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THE TEMPER OF THE 
AMERICAN PEOPLE 



BY 



GEORGE THOMAS SMART 



A chield's amang you takin' notes. 
And faith he'll prent it. 



Burns 




THE PILGRIM PRESS 

BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO 



^ ' ^ 



COPYRIGHT, 1912 
BY LUTHER H. CART 



THB.PLIMPTON.PRBSS 

[ W • D . o] 
NORWOOO>MASS*U>S-A 



©C(.A327815' 



TO 
C. H. S. 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

J. HE Author^ many years a resident in America, 
has endeavored to set down, in the following pages, 
his interpretation of American life, in a more orderly 
fashion than was possible in the answers given to 
countless questions put to him by those who were living 
it. He is glad to acknowledge the help he received in 
many discussions, private and public, where the 
subjects he considers were the themes of debate. 
Perhaps his final naturalization is here witnessed, as 
he joins with Americans in attempting to expound 
their social and national meanings. 



[vii] 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Fact, Idea, axd Fkfj.txg rv America ... S 



n. The Sen'se of History in America . 

in. Political Feelings in .America .... 

r\'. The Continiintal Spirit: "Ogr Country" 

V. The Estimate of Popflation 

\"I. Metropolitan ant) Suburban Emotions . 

MI. Industrial Attitudes in America 

Vin. The Element of Change in Americ.w Life 

IX. The Sentiments of Americ.vn Society . 

X. The Admiration of Education in America 



2« 
47 

70 
89 
113 
135 
160 
180 
206 



XI. The Moral ant) Religious Tisiper of America 531 



[k] 



THE TEMPER OF 
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 



THE TEMPER OF 
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE 

CHAPTER I 
FACT, IDEA, AND FEELING IN AMERICA 



IT is common for the unimaginative but effective man 
to decry ideas and overestimate action; and never 
has this been the general temper of the men who con- 
stitute the "efficient" more than today. For Atlantic 
civilization, — which seems a better term than Anglo- 
Saxon, — is idolatrous of the energy that apphes itself 
to a new ordering of things. Contemporary civiliza- 
tion, therefore, appears to be material, and to be suspi- 
cious of the infatuation with ideas that affected some 
periods of the Renaissance, or some classes in pre-Revo- 
lutionary France. WTiile our own day has outer marks 
as spectacular as any period of antiquity, it often seems 
to miss the old concomitant of joy, and this is perhaps 
due in part to the fact that it is assumed, because of the 
affirmation of leading persons, to be more material in 
process and goal than is actually the case. 

Moreover, the undisciplined and ineffective masses are 
subject to this impression. No longer do they remain 
"mute trainbearers " rotting in the ditch, or fighting for 
some "glorious victory" of whose origin and end they 
are ignorant; they have declared for indi\'iduality, and 
individuality means to them energy self-directed and 
self-rewarded. So by the side of more ordered spectacles 



4 The Temper of the American People 

on sea and land set in motion by captains of industry and 
aiming at material results, there is an uneasy attempt 
at combined action on the part of the denser masses, 
often misjudged and sad, even tragic; but inexpressibly 
moving to the lover of his kind. 

This concept of modern civilization as basely material 
also gains ground in the minds of the cultured few, who, 
because of the loneliness of luxury, or the diffidence of an 
over-delicate sensitiveness, stand too far away from 
human reality to know what it truly means. In England 
the aristocrat lives in Mayfair, or in a demesne in the 
country where he can shut out the peeping and pathetic 
crowd, and where he can be free of the bourgeoisie. To be 
free of the struggling and partly educated middle class 
is more the note of English aristocracy than to be free 
of the peasantry; for the latter are needed as scene- 
shifters and supporters of the social fabric, while the 
former are only possible invaders of the holy precincts. 
The American of the same type goes abroad. He lives 
in Rome, Paris, Madrid, walking the galleries when they 
are least troubled with tourists, and stepping into an 
older society when it is needy or inadvertent. In both 
cases the real meanings of men are misunderstood, and 
the social phenomena are as poorly classified as biological 
particulars would be if these Sybarites should dabble in 
science. 

This impression of the prevalence and domination of 
material factors in our contemporary life is not surprising 
when we think of the display of the material side of our 
civilization, and the slow percolation natural to ideas 
as they mix with life, and the way history has always 
heard the "drums and tramplings of conquest" and has 
been deaf to the inner voices of the spirit. The matter 
has not been helped either by the emergence of men like 



Fact, Idea, and Feeling in America 5 

Disraeli in England or Mr. Roosevelt in America, who 
were "efficient" in the sense dear to the practical man, 
that is, successful and public, speaking in stentorian tones 
to be heard by posterity. Nor has it been helped by the 
laureates of progress, who speak of the mechanical achieve- 
ments of men and their individualism, represented at 
one extreme by Whitman, who will allow nothing in the 
world bigger or better than himseK, and at the other by 
Mr. Kipling, who sings indifferently the psean of throbbing 
engines, or of beating hearts set to forward an Imperial- 
istic scheme. 

II 

It is not uncommon to find in Europe an immense prej- 
udice against American life, that utters itself with a cer- 
tain superciliousness in the one word "material." And 
this cue has been followed by some of the finer spirits in 
America itself, who have spoken almost despairingly of 
"our material civiUzation." In the end, as a result of 
this double authority, it is now common to find the less 
instructed man somewhat apologetic, a little insecure 
about his own country, and inclined to acquiesce in the 
word "material" as summing it up. 

The true apologist is not the defender so much as the 
interpreter, and the interpreter tries to see why the word 
"material" should be so frequently used in connection 
with American civilization. He surmises that it is mate- 
rial because it is constituted of so many materials. All 
civilization is material on the instrumental side, and in 
general it is a higher civilization in proportion to the 
instruments it has. No civilization can get away from 
its physical and economic foundations, or even from the 
instinctive passions of men, though it clothes them in 
silk to forget them, or transmutes them into the mate- 



6 The Temper of the A me r lean People 

rials of art. History has discovered at last with aston- 
ishment that its most purple pages are due to physical 
and economic causes. These causes and passions are 
still present and they may break through the civil order 
again if provoked, as they did in many a bloody episode 
of the past, when they were unguided by traditional com- 
promise, or by ideal ends set for the furtherance of the 
race. Civilization, moreover, creates materials. Its in- 
struments, even on the blank industrial level, testify to 
the subjugation of nature; and on the higher and freer 
levels of symbol and constitution they react again on the 
brooding thoughts of men. 

Thus the interpreter does not succumb before the mate- 
rial aspects of American life. The materials are the 
records and instruments of progTess. They are not al- 
ways the final records, or the most available instruments 
in the long run, but they are counters in the game. Even 
so with the supreme material instrument, the dollar. 
No one cares for the substantive value of money less 
than the American. The old Ehzabethan feehng for 
gold as a substantive good has gone forever. The Amer- 
ican worships money, if one will, but only as the "obvi- 
ous, undeniable, intrusive result" that shows his view 
of the facts to be right. It comes from the struggle ^-ith 
actuality. This is the verdict of an English banker and 
constitutionalist of the first rank, and the man who has 
lived in America long enough, m the ^'ery midst of the 
"struggle for the dollar," knows Walter Bagehot is cor- 
rect. The instrument is of use in transmuting life into 
the higher values. It merely opens all doors to a man 
who is otherwise competent and fit to enter in. There 
is nothing, in the American's mind, to obstruct compe- 
tence and wealth. ^Ycalth is, at the last analysis, the 
sign of an inward power, and this is worthy of respect. 



Facty Idea, and Feeling in America 7 

III 

The first stage in the transmuting of material values 
into the more ideal is the accent that America puts on 
"the facts." In the literature of caricature, both in 
America and beyond it, thirty years ago, a phrase was 
often in the mouths of the characters portrayed, illustra- 
tive of this tendency. You could see it issuing out of 
the mouths of figures in the humorous prints, you could 
hear it a hundred times a day. "That's a fact," is the 
phrase in question. It was uttered with a certain final- 
ity, as of a matter that could not be disputed, in an 
acquiescent tone as of a thing beyond any further 
peradventure. 

There seems to be something of necessity In this appe- 
tite for facts and the ready digestion of them in Amer- 
ican life; for the national life works itself out in the 
presence of some of the largest facts that the race has ever 
met, whether we consider the phenomenal world of nature, 
or the actual world of humanity. The very situation of 
American life leaves the facts naked and impressive, 
less mixed with the heightening of history, or hidden 
by the symbolism of manners and courtesy, and less 
clothed with the immortality of poetry, than the facts 
of European civilization, which have been too subdued 
to the emotional issues of each generation to appear in 
pristine simplicity. 

America, for example, has come closer to a primeval 
nature than any contemporary European nationality; 
it is closer to it today. It has come into more familiar 
contact with "outdoor people," as Whitman calls them, 
who grew up in these simple conditions, or were imported 
from peasant ranges of life only one remove from animal 
stolidity. America has been enamoured of " the passionate 



8 The Temper of the American People 

tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators 
of gardens and orchards and fields, . . . seafaring per- 
sons, drivers of horses, the passion for light and the 
open air." 

America has also come closer to the origins of national 
history than any other state. European nationality 
begins in obscurity, its early heroes were half or wholly 
mythical personages, its constitutions as irrational as 
an unordered \aew of nature, its goals determined afresh 
in each supervening mood of repression or rebellion. 
But American history begins in the dry light of a recorded 
day. Its incipient constitution may be traced back to 
the earliest word; its personages can be disclosed in 
detail; its goals perceived from the beginning. Nature, 
man, and the ideals of society conspire to put Ameri- 
cans in a world of illumination vastly different and far 
more sincere than the "Illumination" of the Eighteenth 
Century, because this world is not moved solely by 
intellectual considerations. 

American interest in "the facts" is showTi in several 
ways. For example, the preponderating studies of Amer- 
ican youth are economic and scientific. A young man 
who gains a degree in science is reasonably sure of em- 
ployment, and so is a student of economics if he has pre- 
pared himseK in a few of the appHed forms of his science. 
The country needs men to open up its wealth, to improve 
its agricultural processes, to distribute the harvests, to 
coordinate the swift development of industry. No coun- 
try in the world, as a state, organizes institutions for devel- 
oping science, as America, and she is mlling to pay out 
of national funds eight million dollars a year for this pur- 
pose. Germany begins to acknowledge that American 
natural history museums are the best furnished in the 
world, and Professor Lamprecht recently said in Leipsic 



Fact, Idea, and Feeling in America 9 

that "America has left us far behind." Private munifi- 
cence adds to this eminence by endowing great foundations 
for research. Colleges once notable as the home of lit- 
erary studies now add courses in the higher technique of 
business. Everywhere in education, if humanism pre- 
vails at all, it is hkely to be found in the supernumerary 
regions of college life, as the students, freely living among 
their fellows, learn how to manage men, or in the indirec- 
tion of social discourse become aware of the backgrounds 
of art and letters. The facts supreme in American educa- 
tion are less and less the intangible things of the imagi- 
native life. The stuff of physics and politics is more and 
more. 

It is customary for certain Americans to gird at these 
utilitarian preoccupations, and for foreigners to find 
Americans "crude," so that one fair American has been 
known to meet Europeans with the ironic admission, 
"Of course we will admit the crudity, and go on to some- 
thing else in our talk." But the sympathetic onlooker 
feels the immense pressure put on the American mind 
by the American facts. They come in on the thoughtful 
man with the devastating force of Mrs. Partington's 
Atlantic tide. America is engaged, like this good woman, 
in keeping its domicile of constitutional and social hfe 
from being washed away by the flood. The extreme 
apologist may even go so far as to say that no humanistic 
culture is available \n hile the disorder is so great, or the 
development is so rapid; the true man will roll up his 
sleeves and clear things up. 

Hence the American interest in statistical presenta- 
tions of the national life. America is the home of the 
census, the cash-register, and the calculating machine. 
Its very phraseology is computative as it "figures out" a 
probable expense, or how a thing is to be done. While 



10 The Temper of the American People 

the ten million dollars spent on the census, which is the 
most complete in the world, indicates the American esti- 
mate of the worth of the individual citizen who is there 
tabulated, it shows no less the national delight in the 
orderly setting down of the factual details of personal 
life. The first thing the pupil in the high school is taught 
to do is to look up the facts and authorities; in college 
the thesis, so frequent in historical and economic courses, 
depends on a search of the records for the facts. In men's 
clubs when a friendly debate is arranged, the participants 
scour libraries, write to labor and reformatory organiza- 
tions for printed matter, apply even to European ambas- 
sadors for opinions and instruction. And in the women's 
literary sets where there is any attempt at educational 
intercourse, the search for facts is the prevailing method. 
We shall see a little later some of the "peccant humors" 
of this emphasis; but for the present we remark it as a 
common attitude of the American mind. 

Once again, the persons estimated of worth in the com- 
munity are generally the "men who have done things," 
While the humanist laments the indifference to the 
imaginative learning that after all best interprets the 
"facts" when found, he is bound to admit that the liking 
for men who have done something illustrates a broad 
human feeling, and even he may be inveigled to leave 
his books to look at the man who is doing the things that 
he may himself write down in literature. Often the 
estimate of the thing done is excessive; the hero may have 
only said that he did something; often the thing he did 
may have been of little permanent moment; but that 
he did, or tried to do, something gives him standing among 
his fellows. So great is this lust of activity in America, 
that books of the contemplative life are increasingly hard 
to sell; but books about active people — the efficient — 



Fact, Idea, and Feeling in America 11 

especially when ^T-itten by themselves, swiftly find a 
public and give a large return to the publishers. The 
publisher no longer waits for an immortal manuscript 
to be left anonymously at his door; he goes out into the 
strident world and finds the man at the center of it, and 
demands of him that he shall WTite his life and opinions. 
When he does, it is needless to say that he gets along 
faster than Tristram Shandy; but his book is not 
immortal. 

This efficient and factual method has its defects; but 
it also has its worth, and particularly in respect to the 
disclosures of actual contemporary life. The humanist 
of today sympathizes with Thomas Love Peacock, who, 
lamenting a hundred years ago the sweep of the Romantic 
movement and the desertion of classic ideals, cried "The 
Dexnl has got all the best fellows." Yet he must acknowl- 
edge that the new approach to life has its own value. 

A good number of men are engaged in setting forth 
the underside of national life as well as the upper. It is 
true that these do not always keep the scientific equilib- 
rium. Sometimes they do, as in the case of a remarkable 
study of vice in a great American city. But occasion- 
ally they grow too vociferous, and would make men 
think that "shame" is all that cities have, or that rather 
commonplace men who do a day's duty are of "the giant 
race before the flood." They often speak unadvisedly, 
hysterically, almost strangled with indignation, and have 
yet to learn the withering scorn of cool tones like those of 
Dean S\snft. These feel that evil is too forward and needs 
to be fought by a St. George in each generation. And 
they conceive that the first step to a final \'ictory is to 
"get the facts before the people." 

Thus in varying ranges of her national life does Amer- 
ica wait upon facts, and enlarge the lesser half of De 



12 The Temper of the American People 

Quincey's classification of literature, — "the literature 
of knowledge." 

IV 

And yet the student whose reading of life has only been 
cursory is obliged to believe that ideas rule the action of 
our own age, as in other times, and that the immense 
social phenomena of our day, while confusing the searcher 
for them, occasionally disclose them, or subtly testify to 
their existence. Ideas have always lain at the heart of 
men's actions. The conflict between irreconcilable con- 
cepts has been as fierce as that between rival thrones, 
and the results have been as impressive as the outer spec- 
tacles of man's activity that color the field with either 
gold or blood. From the time of Plato's dialectic up to 
the lucid panorama of Professor Bergson's philosophy, 
the world of ideas has been quite as enthralling as the 
world of action to a certain class of minds, and it has 
left monuments of itself that outlast the most durable 
works of man in the world of things. The Acropolis 
is but a divine fragment; Plato remains nearly whole 
and perfect. 

So, today, ideas are abroad. They are effective even 
in the older political units and the older forms of soci- 
ety. They have been the makuig of some of the newer 
entities that hold the scene, of Germany, for example, 
whose dream of a united empire has come true. France 
has always been susceptible to ideas. England in spite 
of aristocratic inertia is awaking to them in the mass of 
the people. 

Once, ideas seemed to be the exclusive prerogative of 
the Frenchman, who coined hypnotic phrases in the Revo- 
lution, and knew how to make madness beautiful; but 
the Frenchman too often forgets the Infinite in his desire 



Fact, Idea, and Feeling in America 13 

for portable truth, and is too regardless of the penumbra 
of implication that hangs upon his thesis. Later, ideas 
were deemed the peculiar property of the German, but 
here again they grow too abstract and absolute, or too 
vague and sentimental, ending in "that fearful German 
tender-heartedness," as M. Rolland calls it, in the midst 
of which true thought sleeps. In England, social ideas 
as generally diffused in the higher regions, are partly rudi- 
mentary instincts, the dumb feeling of a comfortable 
security, a sense of surprise that any change should be 
demanded or that tradition should be interrupted; and 
among the middle classes there is an obstinate determi- 
nation to get one's rights, and to get them by victory 
rather than gift, — to keep both aristocracy and labor 
in their place. 

All this is evident to the man interested in compara- 
tive politics. But there is one country where ideas are 
diffused most of all. In America, life is fluid enough, 
tempered enough, to allow ideas to play freely. Some- 
times, to be sure, the conceptions are raw, as when inco- 
herencies in religion or politics speedily gain a hearing; 
but this is more hopeful than intellectual indifference. 



There are good reasons why America should be hos- 
pitable to ideas. All the great American facts allow 
ideal formulations. 

In the first place, at its beginning, America was a 
system of ideas, a country of the soul's hope, and nothing 
more, — that is, so far as the preponderating ideals of 
New England were concerned. The early settlers were 
men who were driven on by the ideal. There was nothing 
for them in aboriginal America but freedom, which 



14 The Temper of the American People 

Americans have always conceived in somewhat mystical 
terms, — a freedom mainly, in the first generation, to 
suffer and to die. What the earlier settlers brought with 
them was a choir of heaven rather than a furniture of 
earth. They had everything to make, a physical founda- 
tion for civilization, a political modus vivendi, — nothing 
was ready-made. To most of them America was an 
idea, and this early bent has been accentuated in the 
successive settlements of the national domain as the 
children of the Puritans took their way westward. 

Professor Munsterberg affirms that American patriot- 
ism is not bound to the soil, nor to the citizen, but to a 
system of ideas. What this critic has in mind is the 
apparent indifference of an American as to where he lives, 
— the lack of personal affection for some locality where, 
as in Europe, the family abode has continued for genera- 
tions. The American changes his residence swiftly and 
without remorse at the insistence of need. Compared 
with the German's heimweh the American seems almost 
heartless. Compared with the Englishman's love of some 
little stream, or village, or town, the memory of which 
comes upon him with the force of a visitation when he 
lives abroad for long, or in another locality, the American 
seems stoical. He appears impervious to nostalgia. 

But he makes up for this territorial indifference by a 
historical and social fervor that amazes the observer. 
If he appears to be careless where he lives, he is passion- 
ately careful of what system of ideas he lives in, and his 
first great anxiety for the aliens who come to him is that 
they shall be indoctrinated at once. Much of the his- 
tory taught in American schools is childish, some of it 
is mischievous, and the crying need in the larger interna- 
tionalism now thrust upon America is a larger concept 
of her own history; but the American instinct is sure 



Fact, Idea, and Feeling in America 15 

that history should be the American's first country. One 
finds no parallel in England for this assiduous and rever- 
ent study of the smallest matters in the national his- 
tory. Almost every native American is an archaeologist 
in respect to the Puritan times. Once a year, in most 
organizations, there is a return to the forefathers in eulogy 
and exposition, and as for the Constitution-building period. 
Independence Day affirms and emphasizes its worth by 
a public holiday that makes the meanest urchin happy. 
The English boy studies a history of twenty centuries, 
entangled x^'ith twenty principalities; the American youth 
studies a history of barely three hundred years, and of 
one nation. He can thus travel over it leisurely enough 
to know admiringly the local demigods and the smaller 
heroisms. 

This simplicity of American history has affected the 
American mind in two ways. First, it has freed the social 
body from the heavy and unintelligible weight of tradi- 
tion that makes other countries live upon the sum-total 
of past experience. The English constitution broadens 
down from precedent to precedent and is the precipi- 
tate of national experience. Hence England leans on the 
past and cannot meet the future so open-handedly as 
America, cannot afford to be so visionary because she 
has given many hostages to fortune, and because so 
many cords tie her prophets to the pillars of society. 
Scarcely can she embrace the gifts of today \^4thout ask- 
ing the consent of men long since dead to lift their heavy 
mortmain. This has made a national life with a special 
glory, — a life of maxim, subUmated and energized, but 
maxim still. 

America, however, was founded on a postulate. The 
Pilgrims and Puritans had no social experience to fall 
back upon that they loved enough to introduce in the 



16 The Temper of the American People 

new world. They wished to forget the oppressive maxims 
of the mother who mismiderstood them. The httle ships 
traversing the Atlantic in 1G20 were freighted with few 
precious wares, but they contained precious lives, and 
still more precious was the freight of social postulates 
they carried. So the American is taught that intel- 
lectual and spiritual aflSrmation is his heritage, and that 
no interests vested or invested shall stand in the way. 
There is, of course, the frequent inconsistency of erect- 
ing these early postulates into a verbal tradition that 
squares awkwardly with present life; but on the whole 
they have worked fairly well, perhaps because they are 
few, and more still because they are spiritual. 

The other great effect of the simplicity of the national 
history has been the explicitness of its postulates. No 
history is as explicit as that of America. The sources 
lie nearly within the critical period, and they are numer- 
ous and self-explanatory. The nation-builders not only 
built, but they talked of what they were doing. Ameri- 
can history is thus declaratory. This means that it is 
a history of political ideas, rather than a recital of expedi- 
ents; for if it should happen that the acts were expedi- 
ents, as was sometimes the case, the moment they are 
declared they take on conceptual form. The same thing 
goes on today. If America "means its creeds much more 
literally" than England, it is because it has said its 
creed so often that it is sharply wrought into the national 
mind, and affords a clear and definite starting-point for 
thinking about the national life. 

This conceptual and declaratory attitude of America 
to its own history, indicating an interest in ideas, is 
supported by the situation of American life. 

The geography of America ministers to the primacy 
of ideas in the national life. Physical environment tends 



Fact, Idea, and Feeling in America 17 

to set ideas free in America. The apathy of the EngHsh 
rustic, before the national schools had worn down a 
little of his stolidity, was not altogether due to the fear 
of giving himself away to his superiors, nor was it wholly 
due to ignorance. It sprang partly from a dull and in- 
wrought fatalism that learned to be over-patient with 
a Nature that always brought forth painfully, and some- 
times not at all. Many years of sowing and few of reap- 
ing take the heart out of a man, and he begins to trust to 
luck or laziness. But the American agriculturist faces 
another climate and soil. While it is greater in the range 
of its extremes of changeability, it is more predictable 
than in England, and more uniform in results upon agri- 
culture. The western continent also has a far greater 
diversity of products. On the one side there results for 
the laborer a more secure procedure following axioms 
that generally work, and on the other a mixture of diverse 
experiences leading to an inrush of ideas. If the envir- 
onment be complex the brain is likely to grow reactively 
powerful; and the powerful brain is likely to become the 
instrument of general ideas. 

The diverse population has further emphasized the 
matter under discussion. The incoming alien has led to 
questions whether he should come, and when here he 
has asked questions and got his answers in affirmative 
postulates. He has brought, what Americans often 
forget, liis old ways of doing things, to a new environ- 
ment, leading to results on both. He has, by very 
ignorance, opened the eyes of his predecessors to 
certain values. Meanwhile the native, who, until forty 
years ago, was a frontiersman in no small number, and 
by virtue of the needs of that life was a man of many 
trades, developed ideas as a result of change from one 
avocation to another. And when he became a trans- 



18 The Temper of the American People 

posed agriculturist who applied his independent way of 
life and thought to industrial processes, ideas where let 
loose in the end. The inrush of new thoughts is hardly 
to be exceeded when a man undertakes a new kind of 
work, or handles a new instrument, and this occurs much 
more in America than elsewhere. The lives of leading 
Americans have often been an Odyssey of varied labors. 
They have done many things and learned much from 
each. Added to this is the frequency with which collegi- 
ans turn to manual tasks while going through the schools, 
or the other frequency of the worker gaining a college 
education, and we see the open ground for new concep- 
tions, and the probable hospitality to them when they 
come. 

This introduces a potent factor in American concep- 
tual life, — the college man. There is no need to recite 
the immense number of American youths who proceed 
to a degree. Some of these degrees are admittedly poor 
designations and somewhat too loudly profess the evi- 
dence of culture when it is hardly begun. But on the 
whole, for the purposes of American life, though the work 
done in many cases is not as thorough as could be wished, 
education is yet in closer contact with the outside life 
than is the languorous ease of the older English founda- 
tions, and it is certainly more human than the discipline 
that turns out the spectacled German scholar. 

Fascinated by the strictly social studies of history, 
economics, and law, when he can ignore the invitations 
of physical science, the American student takes his place 
in life on graduation, at the heart of it, to do his work, 
which is not only to seek a career for himself, but also 
to say what he thinks of life while living it. He is often 
described as "theoretical" by the "efficient" Philistines 
who traveled over the road before him in a more primi- 



i 



Fact, Idea, and Feeling in America 19 

live time and achieved their measure of success; but the 
narrowly practical day is nearly done. The future is 
in the hands of the collegians, who wrest the prizes in a 
short term of years, mainly by the breadth of the ideas 
they have. And though for a few years, — the "four 
years of hell," as collegians describe them, — that ensue 
on graduation, while the struggle for a footing is keenest 
and most uncertain, the college man fails a little in con- 
necting with life, when he finds his place he persistently 
ventilates social questions, governed by the forces that 
make for tomorrow, and when occasion offers he is likely 
"to make reason and the will of God prevail." 

This emergence of ideas in America has led to a rapid 
and serviceable organization of the national life both in 
its federal and local relations. The American is apt 
to see what he wants and to fit his instruments to do the 
work. But sometimes, because they worked so well, 
or because the citizen has been too heedless to change, 
old principles have been erected into a sacred political 
philosophy. Because of its clarity the idea has been 
accepted as absolute, carried on to the next generation 
with advantage perhaps, as when there is a recurrence 
to "the principles of the Founders"; but sometimes it 
has been obstructive, preempting the place of something 
better, and thwarting the generous proposals of a more 
understanding life. So that America, in spite of its mate- 
rialistic phenomena, is as doctrinaire as can be imagined, 
and in an idealistic way; for it insists on an overpower- 
ing emphasis of early foundations of the national mean- 
ing, and then insists on these principles being carried 
out with a symmetry that is more logical than vital. 

When we come to American feelings we have before us 
the main subject of this book, a subject that has usually 
been treated less directly than implicitly, or even hardly 



20 The Temper of the American People 

treated at all. The stranger coming to the subject with 
his prepossessions is partly blinded before he begins his 
interpretation. How can one expect feeling in a people 
so actively utilitarian? or so symmetrically doctrinaire? 
Feelings are supposed to have some social issues and 
returns, and in America what have we but the idolatry 
of the individual? Even within the national life there 
are many who are not quite awake to the emotions of 
their own people, because preoccupied with the organiza- 
tion of physical and human forces. 

We may better delay a detailed account of American 
emotions until we come closer to the various aspects of 
national life and treat them more fully; but the fallacy 
of thinking America emotionless save in the one deter- 
mination of avarice is denied by the themes already 
treated. 

If America had no feelings would she care to formu- 
late an apology of nationality as passionate as her pres- 
ent attempt? If she had only limited emotions at the 
start, how could they remain limited in the face of the 
gigantic and enlarging horizons of her continental nature, 
and her growing and moving humanity? If she is merely 
brutally material, how conies it that she declares her 
ideas with the directness of prophecy? 

One has only to see Americans salute the flag to feel 
the excess of emotion in the national life. A flag is a 
far less interesting symbol of national life than a sover- 
eign in whose veins courses the known blood of a race of 
kings, or a president who sums up the mandates of the 
majority of the citizens; but American feeling imputes 
to this square yard of cloth almost magic worth. It 
floats from schoolhouses and decorates public holidays. 
It is preserved by law from ignoble uses. The most 
cultivated look upon it in foreign travels as the key to 



I 



Fact, Idea, and Feeling in America 21 

their personal as well as public history, and always nar- 
rate in the story of their journeys where they saw "the 
flag." The sudden unfolding of it brmgs a cheer, and any 
reference to it catches applause and votes. Where its 
mere similitude is thrown upon the lantern-screen in an 
academic address, the audience reacts to it responsively. 
The most stolid and ignorant, or the most narrowly chau- 
vinistic veteran of the war, see in it a sign of the dearest 
hopes of the social life. It is always magical, and some- 
times it grows personal, as in the case of a poor Mountain 
White, who on receiving one as a gift laid it on her bosom 
and crooned it a lullaby. 



CHAPTER II 

THE SENSE OF HISTORY IN AMERICA 



THERE are many Americans who do not care for 
American politics, but there are few who do not 
care for American history. If one stirs deeply enough 
the sleeping imagination of the practical man, who lets 
politics alone "to attend to business," or questions the 
slightly contemptuous man of breeding who evades 
political responsibilities by flight to other lands, in each 
there is still discoverable some remnant of historic feel- 
ing. Both may appear to be hardened against sentimen- 
tal patriotism, but imder stimulation each remembers 
gratefully the primacies of national history, and each is 
apt to be tender towards them when aroused. Still more 
in the case of the less instructed citizen the historic feel- 
ing is paramount. Wliatever the child or the childlike 
man may forget, he is apt to remember the great facts 
of the national history. 

There are several reasons for this. First in impor- 
tance for the least thoughtful man, is the continual remin- 
der of American history in the processionals of common 
life. The veterans of the Civil War parading the streets 
once or twice a year, related as they are to the ordinary 
citizens, keep the Uttle circles of their relationsliip alive 
to the epic memories of "the War." Now that these 
become a dwindling renmant, their sons, — "the Sons of 
Veterans," — carry on the memory of their fathers' 



The Sense of History in America 23 

deeds. These, too, march through the city streets and 
revive in a moving fasliion the historical events of the 
past. 

Of course all is not pure sentiment or pure history; 
some of the baser motives intrude. The "veterans" are 
not always men who have faced death. Moreover, some 
of them have been too greedy for pensions which now 
amount to a hundred and fifty millions a year. Latterly 
also a few tend to disgust the more thoughtful by clamor 
for public recognition, and by a foolish garrulity joined 
with a rather comic self-importance and the general 
childishness of old age. The sons of these veterans are 
also open to the suspicion of miwarrantable ancestral 
pride. And all of them too loudly assume instructorship 
in a patriotism that reverts back in its lessons for fifty 
years, and has slight inkling of the dangers of today. 
But in spite of these defects, the annual gathering of the 
veterans of the Civil War is a historical object-lesson of 
immense importance in a country where great numbers 
of aliens never knew the struggles that built up the state. 

Historical societies, further, determine for a good many 
people the materials and setting of social life. There 
are societies like the "Daughters of the Revolution," 
whose members trace their ancestry to the earlier settlers, 
and form little communities for social intercourse, mildly 
spiced with history, and edged perhaps with social rival- 
ries. At these gatherings, from which those whose posi- 
tion is finally secure are generally absent, music and 
the declamation of historical incidents constitute the 
entertainment. While to the broader mind these small 
ambitions appear jejune, there is something to be said 
for them, since history gains a hearing, and the fact is 
announced through the contiguous areas of social life that 
there was once a great race and an epic period, and that 



24 The Temper of the American People 

to be connected with it, even remotely by ancestry, is 
at once a social advantage and a sacred trust. Smaller 
organizations of those who reckon their descent from a 
particular person meet annually. In these there may 
be the personal rivalries of those who seek an office, or wish 
to be the recognized biographer of the distant ancestor; 
but all partizan differences moderate in the work of de- 
fending the ancestral memory. Here again history steps 
forward to impress and move. It is transmitted in actual 
flesh and blood; and a constantly increasing number 
of people remember it and gain by remembrance. 

It is in the primary schools, however, that the sense 
of history is most developed in the individual life. Amer- 
ica has no folk-lore, no tales of curious magic that make 
the cosmic and aboriginal events personal, and speak out 
their sinister or beneficent designs. Even the Indians 
flit through the pages of American history with far less 
significance to the native than the European would 
expect who has been brought up on Fenimore Cooper's 
novels. The American has seen too many Indians to 
believe in them, though he is now turning to them as 
materials of art again. But children denied of folk-lore 
must needs have something to take its place, and this 
something, for Americans, is the actual history of the 
country, and the biographies of the outstanding persons 
who emerged in each age. 

It is almost impossible for a European to understand 
this obsession of a few insignificant facts of history in 
the American school. Europeans have their history 
too, but it is long and complicated, and other nations 
enter into it, and the glamor of the strange lessens the 
glory of the known. The English schoolboy is bound 
to cross the Channel as he studies his history, and there 
he faces a foreign civilization full of romantic surprises 



The Sense of History in America 25 

and studded with memorable names. He gives his own 
compatriots due eminence, but he is yet aware of the 
greatness of other men. Above all, his partialities are 
mitigated by the enormities of time. But the American 
child is unconfused by many strains of the national life 
and finds in his history an almost miraculous clearness, 
in which events and characters stand near enough to 
him to be significant in contemporary life, and far enough 
away to be lifted into immortality. With the flag on 
the schoolhouses, declamations from history on all pub- 
lic days in school, processionals in the streets, and social 
organizations standing on a historical basis, it is not sur- 
prising that a certain Sunday-school teacher, when asking 
her class who was the first man, immediately received 
for answer, "George Washington." 



II 

There are four periods in American history, each of 
which has its great moments, its emerging personahties, 
and its imaginative influence on the national life. 

The first is the heroic period covering the beginnings 
of settlement. I had almost called it the sacred period, 
because of its religious idealism. The very earhest his- 
tory was quite as economic and competitive as periods 
nearer to our own day, but those tremors of piracy and 
brutality gave way in time to a prophetic vision that saw 
some of the eternal goods of human society. Few people, 
— even those taught from childhood, — see at first the 
vast issues at stake in the beginning of American history. 

The earliest issue was one of race, — of civilizations. 
Spain had the fairest chance that a nation could hope 
for, when, under her auspices, the New World was dis- 
covered. But Spain lacked ideaUsm. She had no long 



26 The Temper of the American People 

thoughts. And she was cruelly avaricious. The five 
thousand millions of spoliation she had taken by 1609 
had burned out her soul. She did not seek to make a 
New World really new; she tried rather to make it old 
by importing her impassive ideas across the iVtlantic. 
She sought to convert the natives and to make them work 
so that she could retiu-n home well laden ^N-ith goods. 
She was only a transient, and she intended to be so. The 
early English colonists were perhaps no more humane 
than the Spanish; but they planted themselves more 
deeply in the New World. They called their colonies 
"plantations." After Spain, another Latin ci\'ilization 
might have been lasting if it had known enough to hold 
what it had won. But the English at home and in the 
colonies were of one mind in respect to this, — that Amer- 
ica was to be English and nothing else. So in the early 
period Indian, Spaniard, and Frenchman were pushed 
out of the domain and the reckoning. 

Thus there remained the English stock beset by ter- 
rors of the physically unknown, and the greater terrors 
of the supernatural; but with an instinct for building a 
state, and settling down to wear away horror by familiar- 
ity, and to overcome it by courage. The heroism of these 
early settlers was of a new species, partly made up of 
the Elizabethan passion, but enlarged by daily contacts 
with the awful expectancies of death and eternity. The 
courage of Drake and the men who banged the dogs of 
Seville was insolent; but at last it became a new order 
of spiritual obstinacy in the pitiful survivors of the fii'st 
ISIassachusetts winter, who would not go back to Eng- 
land though haK their number was dead and the other 
haK was star^^ng. There is a courage of the middle hour 
of battle, and a courage that waits for the imroUing of 
the scroll of destiny, and a courage that submits to the 



The Sense of History in America 27 

inexorable demands of hunger and pestilence, and in all 
these respects the early heroes gave a good account of 
themselves, though not many of them had been trained 
to hardship. 

Joined with the race conflict was the religious issue. 
Spain and France were not only competitors with Eng- 
land for a domain, they were types of religious belief 
repugnant to the English settlers, as well as to other 
strains that came with or after them. The early explorers 
of Spain sought to aggrandize the church as well as the 
state. The English settlers not only sought to escape 
the particular oppressions of their own land; they also 
tried to keep their borders free from the imposition of 
powers worse than those from which they fled. Many 
streams of immigration came hither to reenforce the 
Protestant independency. French Huguenots sought a 
new state from which to help their brethren at home. 
The Dutch traders helped to increase the sum of Prot- 
estantism. The Quakers brought a light that could not 
be put out. Even the English Catholics came seeking 
a toleration denied them at home. It was toleration that 
men sought, the freedom to live the inner life in its own 
necessary way. And to realize this the outer life must 
be a humble servitor. 

There were also political issues at stake in this first 
period. The early settlers soon began to seek a larger 
liberty. They wished to be "left alone," — a temper 
and attitude persisting to this day in their descendants. 
And \hey were amazingly astute in the means they chose 
to secure their ends. In the pre-Revolutionary days 
they went softly to prevent interference by the home 
government. They founded their colonies and developed 
their states with a show of royal authority and a sincere 
profession of loyalty, only to draw the fangs of autocracy 



28 The Temper of the American People 

as soon as they began to bite. While doubtless they 
desired to remain a part of the land they fled from because 
their precarious , situation needed help, and while they 
disliked the term "colonist" and wished to be deemed 
Englishmen with rights under English laws and char- 
ters, they yet had superior allegiances of the spirit before 
which the political loyalties had to be subordinate. The 
intention of the Fathers, dimly seen and confusedly 
attained, was an English civilization that should be 
Protestant and free. 

One more issue appears in this early time, — the social, 
— one that did not become so marked at the start, but 
later grew important. The older society was stratified, 
with an immense pressure of privileged classes upon the 
disinherited mass of men. The first American reorgani- 
zation of social life was a vertical cleft separating colonial 
life from the autocracy of Europe. The second was hori- 
zontal and remolded the social life within. Colonial 
governors did not understand the leaven working in the 
colonial experience, nor the necessary changes that fol- 
lowed from the new situation. The colonial life was a 
new order of social experience, just as it was a new order 
of physical and economic experience. 

At first, even in New England, the old order was kept. 
The settlers were seated in church on the basis of estate, 
office, and age. Public eulogies of aristocracy were not 
unknown. Democracy was only political; social classes 
existed, and each was concerned about its privilege. Until 
a late day a tradition of autocracy existed among the 
clergy. But the pressures of exigent necessity and a 
widening and freer experience were making inevitable a 
democratic society. "When Adam delved and Eve span. 
Who was then a gentleman?" is a perennial question. 
In America, for several generations, men had to delve 



I 



The Sense of History in America 29 

and women to spin, and so there emerged the democratic 
idea of equahty. Thus at the close of the heroic age in 
America, the civihzation achieved was EngUsh, Protes- 
tant, free, and measurably equal. 

Thus, in outline, we see the prevailing bequests of the 
heroic age to Americans of today. When we consider 
the greatness of the inheritance, we need not be sur- 
prised at the emotion developed by these gifts. It is 
the emotion of reverence carried almost to religious 
intensity. 

The Englishman looks back over his history without 
the peculiar feeling of the American who looks to the 
story of the Founders. His national beginnings are 
described by one great Englishman as the history of 
"kites and crows." They lie so far back that he cannot 
transport himself thither in imagination; and they have 
few ideal qualities, though Tennyson finds some in Boa- 
dicea. The old personages are dim and shadowy. Ca- 
nute stands as evident as any; but the story about him 
that challenged the schoolboy's attention is now disputed. 
Alfred the Great is a name calling up the memory of 
martial exploits; but his real significance, in the field of 
learning, is hardly thought of by the mass of those who 
know the tradition of his life. Though the Englishman 
has equal rights to the first settlers in America with the 
Americans themselves, or has direct descent from their 
compeers who remained at home and fought the same 
battle for freedom, he still lacks the reverence that Ameri- 
cans have for their Puritan ancestors. Cromwell, as 
mighty a soul as ever lived, and Puritanism, the "last 
of the English heroisms," do not awaken his feelings of 
reverence. These are interesting. But the English- 
man's heart, even among Nonconformist classes, at least 
in youth, and afterwards if he be frank, is not with the 



30 The Temper of the American People 

sullen army that waited on Blackheath to dominate the 
Parliament. It is with Charles in the oak-tree, and he 
shows it by wearing oak-leaves on the first of May. I 
do not know any period in English history that calls 
forth reverence, as the American reverences the early 
days of his own, though there would seem to be some 
ground for it. The political cleft that remains in Eng- 
lish national life is a preventer of entire admiration. 

The American's reverence for his earliest national an- 
cestors, on consideration, appears to be due to the com- 
bination in those ancestors of religious idealism and prac- 
tical efficiency. They were brave enough to suffer if 
need be; they were wise enough to succeed. The Eng- 
lish Puritans did not succeed. They were merely an 
episode, leaving some results, of course, but not changing 
the direction of national life. The American Puritans 
founded a great nation. They are judged by the ideal- 
ist for ideal reasons, and by the practical man for prac- 
tical reasons. Both ideally and practically they survive; 
for their ideals are set in the Constitution, and their 
practice in the national life. The reverence that Ameri- 
cans have for this period in their national life is the 
respect they have today for these very qualities in men, 
only heightened by distance, for the American is a prac- 
tical idealist. The separation of American history in 
the Eighteenth Century from the history of Europe, 
when England became another nation, kept alive a se- 
quence of feeling unbroken by outer invasions, though 
there were slight European connections in the wars of 
1697 and 1702. Moreover, the "winning of the West," 
hardly ended yet, where the founding of a town is like 
the founding of an early settlement, keeps alive the pos- 
sibility of sympathy and understanding for those who 
first carved a home and state out of the wilderness. 



The Sense of History in America 31 

This reverence is carried far, sometimes provoking a 
smile when the observer is critically just. Extreme opin- 
ion demands that the foreign-born treat these idols respect- 
fully, and listen appreciatively to indiscriminate eulogy, 
while at the same time they must be prepared to disclaim 
all rights in these worthy personages. The outsider must 
not scrutinize them for defects. He must be tolerant of 
Puritan intolerance. He must not allege equal virtue in 
their home-staying companions. Especially should he not 
affirm too loudly that the other side had equal men of 
light and leading — Jeremy Taylor or Lord Falkland — 
either or both the peers of any men of the first few genera- 
tions in the new settlement. But at the end of all his 
reservations, he comes in the main to the national 
estimate, and salutes these heroes as the hope of a nobler 
day, hierarchical persons even, since they began the 
propaganda of the religion of humanity. 



Ill 

Though the events in the next period of American 
history, — which I venture to call the Classic Age, — are 
nearer to the modern man than the heroic age just 
described, for many reasons they are more difficult to 
estimate dispassionately. 

For the Englishman there is the initial difficulty of 
ignorance. He hardly knows anything of the American 
Revolution, and still less of the ferment just preceding it, 
till he reaches years of discretion — possibly not till he 
comes to America itself — unless he happens to be es- 
pecially interested in history; for America, in her most 
critical days, was only an episode in English history, beset 
as it was with world-wide anxieties. At about the time 
Cornwallis surrendered, England was at war with the 



32 The Temper of the American People 

United States, France, Holland, and Spain; and Con- 
tinental predispositions closed the eyes of Englishmen 
until too late to the real significance of the American 
revolt. During the whole of the period covered by the 
Revolution the Englishman's main interest was in France, 
where a death-grapple continued till after the War of 
1812, first to keep France from adding a new continent 
to its domain either in India or America; and second, to 
suppress the irrationality of the French Revolution, and 
the equal but different egotism of Napoleon. 

For the American there is the difficulty of a dogmatic 
tradition. The declaratory nature of American history 
has a dangerous as well as a noble side. One may declare 
why one does things and make the honesty of the action 
evident; but it is easy to go on and think that the honesty 
of the motive establishes the wisdom of the thing done. 
This has been the persistent fallacy of religious dogmatism; 
it is also the weakness of political afiirmation. And the 
fallacy creeps into the field of history. Thus Americans 
are not quite able to discuss with absolute coolness the 
major enterprises of their national life and the great fames 
connected with them. 

However, trying to see as clearly as we may, we find 
that American history in the period immediately ante- 
cedent to the Revolution, is a chapter in racial history. 
The supreme thing in the history of the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury is not that America became independent, but that 
America remained Enghsh when she might have be- 
come French, as a hundred and fifty years earlier she might 
have become Spanish. The colonists themselves esti- 
mated justly the gravity of the situation. They were 
enthusiastic against France. New Jersey voted five 
dollars 'per capita for every man, woman, and child, to be 
used in the war against France. Even the French Cana- 



The Sense of History in America 33 

dians grew restless when Montcalm's soldiers were quar- 
tered upon them. Hence the Englishman, when awakened 
from his slumber of ignorance about American history, 
sees this as the fact of the greatest moment. Compared 
with French domination the loss of the colonies was as 
nothing. When he thinks of the reenforcement of con- 
stitutional government, of English speech and letters, 
of Anglo-Saxon morals, in a word, of democracy, he 
rejoices with a sublimated chauvinism that matches the 
fervid moods of Americans themselves. 

A second phase of the classic age in America is con- 
stitutional. The American Revolution did not come as a 
result of tyranny on the part of England, though the 
popular orators used so to describe it. America was 
extremely prosperous; ports grew, merchants became rich, 
the South was smiling with harvests, the crops of Penn- 
sylvania were abundant, pioneers were winning new 
domains, Massachusetts increased in commerce. 

The real issue was the two different conceptions of 
government; the English growing from precedent; the 
American developing in amazing rapidity as a necessity 
of experience. The focal point of contact was, as always, 
taxation. Should the colonies be taxed without repre- 
sentation? But vast numbers of Englishmen at home 
were not represented in Parliament, and many who 
thought themselves so were not, since their boroughs 
were vendible property. Besides, many Americans were 
not the patriots that after times alleged; enlistments were 
slow and on occasion forced; and in some cases base per- 
sons became historical martyrs through the misinterpre- 
tations of history. But the point is, that American 
experience had brought American citizens to the percep- 
tion that government rests on the consent of the governed 
earlier than Englishmen had perceived it, and so America 



34 The Temper of the American People 

had the future on its side. It was in direct hne with the 
coming age. 

The outside observer notes, however, that the principle 
has never been apphed as unreservedly in America as 
the emphasis on it would suggest. There have always 
been great unenfranchised masses in the American popu- 
lation. In the heroic age men who were not church 
members could not vote, and the Founders were as 
"exclusive in their notions of citizenship as the states 
of ancient Greece." In the classic age slaves were de- 
barred. And today there are many negroes disfranchised 
on one pretext or another. Filipinos stand where the 
colonists stood before their independence. Still the con- 
stitutional phase of the American Revolution declared 
government as the gift of the mass of men and not a 
hereditary right, nor an exploitation of personal tyranny; 
and in doing this it forwarded the larger interests not 
only of Americans, but of all men. 

What appears to be irrational, or casuistical, in the 
taxation argument, to the later observer, becomes less 
prejudiced when he considers the attending circumstances. 
The difficulty of shepherdmg the colonies into one political 
fold was immense. John Jay affirmed that till after 1775 
he heard no American declare for independence. There 
might have been separate autonomous states had not the 
French been a standing menace in the early days, and 
Great Britain a constitutional danger in the later. Origi- 
nally the colonial assemblies cheerfully admitted England's 
right to tax foreign trade, if the money was left in the 
country to support the mihtary establishment and the 
administration of justice. Sometimes the colonial grants 
were so liberal that part was returned by Parliament. 
But the habit of cheerful giving had become weakened by 
the time Revolutionary doctrmes were proposed, and 



The Sense of History in America 35 

during the war itself there was extreme sensitiveness on 
the part of the separate states, "a mania" one historian 
calls it, in respect to taxes. The leaders required infinite 
foresight and patience to fuse the colonies together so 
that they attained to nationality, for there was vacilla- 
tion and unrest among the people. The early leaders are 
true statesmen in foresight and discretion as they show by 
their management of the diversity of interests, the igno- 
rant intentions, and the settled obstinacy against taxation 
on the part of the separated colonies. 

So far we have considered the deeper problems and 
results of the Revolution; there are one or two presenta- 
tions of the formal aspects of these doctrines that throw 
light on the American character, by exhibiting the feel- 
ings of Americans in process of crystallization. 

And the first of these is the rhetorical form the doc- 
trines of the Revolution gradually developed. The Revo- 
lution was articulate. The early settlers were men who, 
as political and religious refugees, were trained in the art 
of discrimination and expression. They were often men of 
sensitive feeling, aware of fine distinctions, holding the 
truth tenaciously with great courage. But rhetoric was 
too tempting, and the statesmen who framed the new 
order of things were often led in willing chains behind the 
car of the French Philosophers. Rousseau speaks in the 
early political documents. The rounded periods sound 
well; but since that day the inherent diflSculties of rhetoric 
have grown manifest when it comes to clear conceptions 
of life and right. Just as America has been too suspicious 
of England, she has been too complaisant with France. 
After the Revolution America almost split into parties 
on the issue of the French Revolution, and for long 
French fashions of dress and speech were popular. Jeffer- 
son especially was sympathetic. And the gift of phrase, 



36 The Temper of the American People 

— the color and cleiiruess that constitutes French style, — 
has left its ni:irk on American constitutional life in the 
documents of its political history. Hence problems have 
come uito \'iew as men bethought themsehes of matters 
left out of the portable phrases of the Revolution; and 
there is likely to be an increasing criticism of these plu-ases 
as time goes on. Are men born free? Are they equal.' 
Do they have a right to the pursuit of happiness? Roin- 
terpretations ;ire now the order of the day. 

The other form of Revolutionary doctrine is exemplary. 
The national leaders become examples offered by patriots 
and moralists as worthy of imitation. There may be con- 
fusion of etliiciU judgment in the elevation of some of these 
men mto tlie ranks of martjTs, as in the case of Nathan 
Hale who becomes a type of patriotism, while Major Andre 
who does the same thmg "is engaged in a detestable 
busmess." There may be shadows upon the fame of 
Franklin and Hancock, and at least the former gave no 
e\"idence of the greatest asset of the .:Vineric;in. liis spirituid 
idealism. But for all this America tends to set apart in 
a peculiar way the larger personalities of the Revolution 
and to athrm that they are examples of noble citizenship. 

Waslungton stands at tlie head of these eminent citi- 
zens, somewhat cool, noble with the restraint of a classic 
e<.|uilibrium, in the lapse of time standing at the head of 
the national mytholog%', so splendid in his achievement that 
a sober historian flies to poetry to describe his "seraphic 
spear." He belongs with Pitt and Rurke and even steps 
beyond tliem, since he beguis a new country and a new 
age. If America is to have a topmost n\au in all the state, 
she has judged unerringly in chcKtsing Washington to be 
first in the hearts of his countrymen. 

Thus America looks proudly to the classic age. She 
rejoices in the stature of the public men of the i>eriod, in 



The Sense of History in America 37 

the success of her anus, in the beginnings of national Ufe, 
in the separate heroisms of the day. The American 
reads into it later values, for that is human; but he rightly 
feels the impetus then given to human ideals. He stands 
erect as he remembers the Revolutionary heroes. The 
statuesque greatness of Washington has been a national 
asset of immense importance. In the light of the im- 
placable civic virtue of that great man, thoughtful Ameri- 
cans in each gcTieration have been ashamed to fall below a 
certain standard of citizenship; for the later political 
ventures of men are subtly tried by his disinterested 
moralities. Especially does the exemplary nature of 
American history appeal to youth. The American boy is 
urgetl by these characters to climb the stairway of surprise. 
They beckon to him, invite, compel. 

The outsider is glad to acknowledge the greatness of 
this fruitful time, and to respect the feelings developed by 
it. But he is disturbed also by some manifestations closely 
allied with these noble emotions. 

He wonders, for example, why America looked on Eng- 
land ungenerously for over a hundred years, treating her 
as the one hereditary enemy, absolutely misiuiderstanding 
her motives, thinkmg of her as watchful for reparation, 
when her acts were largely those of ignorance. The early 
text-books of history used in schools were partly to blame, 
stuffed as they were with overweening judgments, and 
depending on the memory of facts rather than reasoned 
conclusions. Then there was the emphasis of Ireland 
transporting its own partially legitimate judgments into 
the new life of America, confusing the issue and keeping 
alive the bitterness. 

It would be easy to understand the bitterness if Ameri- 
can judgments of England were the judgments of the 
conquered; but America, in its general judgment of Eng- 



38 The Temper of the American People 

land as determined by the classic age, is the extreme 
example of the conquerors keeping the bitterness that the 
conquered have lost. The fact stands that England helped 
the colonies against France, and that the Revolutionary 
struggle arose partly out of the help rendered. The help 
rendered may have caused burdens miexpected at the 
start, and some British officers, like the same tribe today, 
may have exasperated the colonists by their treatment; 
but WoKe saved America for Enghsh-speaking people, 
and the cost of that salvation became part of the cause 
of the Revolution. For generations Americans gave no 
thought to these considerations; happily they are now 
beginning to work them out m their scholarship, though 
much leaven yet needs to be set in the mass of her citizens. 
Again the observer is amazed at the uncritical estimate 
of this time on the part of many Americans who are 
unaware of the implications of their own splendid history. 
Much reenforcement is needed, as occasion offers, to make 
clear the racial issues at stake in the Revolution. There 
is also great need of further consideration of the constitu- 
tional questions involved, which then appear to be quite 
as serious for England as for America. There also needs 
to be a revised estimate of the personahties involved on 
the British side. King George was narrow-minded, per- 
verse in folio whig a given course, a kmd of "consecrated 
obstruction" in politics, a follower of the theory of Hobbes, 
a believer m the throne. Bagehot calls him a "meddling 
maniac," and he was this in his later unfortimate days; 
Thackeray calls him a kindly domestic old gentleman. 
The x\merican impression is that he was an active 
"tyrant." Perhaps a fairer judgment is that he was a 
narrow-minded, good man, who unfortunately came to a 
place too high for his powers, and upon a time too swift in 
its development for his lethargic mind. So with Lord 



The Sense of History in Ainerica 39 

North who was not a mere tool. So with Cornwallis, who 
lived to enhance a great reputation for common-sense in 
the government of India. There were good men opposed 
to the separation on both sides of the Atlantic; and many 
in America were willing to risk goods and life for their 
belief. 

The wholesale acceptance of this period has left Ameri- 
cans in awe of a Constitution that they too often look upon 
as a sacred revelation. There has resulted a slowness in 
apprehension that each age must build its own political 
history, and obsolete instruments must give place to life. 
America is slower than the England of today in register- 
ing the popular mandate, and less thorough in carrying- 
it out when known. This confusion of thought leads 
to legal subterfuge. Life somehow must get past the 
obstruction. If the obstruction is deemed sacred, life 
moves on but still swears that it stands as before. Thus 
the uncritical, — Mr. Croly calls it by the uglier name of 
"insincere," — attitude, leads to wretched controversies 
between executives as to where authority lies. Mean- 
while each political party resolutely disclaims irreverence 
or change when amendment may be a plain duty. In the 
mass of men the same temper takes a descriptive for an 
analytic phrase, and so, in the droning statement of rights 
of freedom and happiness, complacently remains ignorant 
of what rights, freedom, or happiness really mean. 

In the struggles of the classic age a great principle was 
proposed when men insisted on representation and de- 
manded the vote. Since then the vote has become a 
higher good still in the estimate of the mass of men. It 
is now a fetish. The foreigner is insistently urged to be- 
come naturalized, not merely by the bosses who wish to 
lead him to the slaughter of the polls, but by good citizens 
who make the recalcitrant feel that he is ungrateful if he 



40 The Temper of the American People 

does not value what cost so much. The ballot is the 
diviue instrument; it is unthinkable that one would not 
care to use it. Yet many negroe:? cannot vote, and the 
people of Porto Rico are men without a country so long 
as no provision is made to give effect to the law conferring 
the power of citizenship upon them; and Filipinos will 
be long in gaining jK)litical rights. At the other extreme 
there are gre^t nimibers that vote without taxation, for 
the two-dollar poll-tax is a negligible sum. All tariffs on 
imports are also taxes on imrepresented people. And the 
Territories miss representation without missing taxation. 
The truth is, that in the Revolution political reconstruc- 
tion was thought of as we think of science today, — all 
tidngs were expected from it, all things asserted of it. 
Some of these expected goods are yet undiscovered. 
But the thoughtless habit of America still affirms what 
experience has denied, and the prevailing optimism hopes 
against hope. 

IV 

The next period we may call the Epic Age in American 
history. 

One aspect of it was the settlement of the West resulting 
from the slow and steady pressure of population, begun 
by Congressional grants of land to Revolutionary soldiers, 
continued by colonizmg companies, and mvited by great 
purchases of the government, and the preemption of large 
tracts beyond for future development. In this pioneer- 
ing stage there are materials of epic. The names of these 
early leaders leak into history and are kept as city appella- 
tions. Their life repeated agam the Viking and Teutonic 
struggles m Europe two thousand years before. Each 
locality has its story of Indian atrocities, its heroes or set 
of heroes; and each doubtless amid the moralities of 



The Sense of History in Ameriea 41 

courage some acts that require the exphxnation of casuistry. 
Once for all Feniuiore Cooper has done ample justice to 
this phase of American life, and his stories remain the 
nearest approach to folk-lore that America possesses. 

The other aspect was more sinister; it was the trouble in 
the blood that issued in the War. In part, it grew out of 
tlie pioneering life, whose activities threw open new 
states, demanding new constitutions, and affected within 
by the antagonistic moralities of Nortli and South. The 
War was not begini to free the slaves, but rather to keep 
free states free. The first issue on both sides was urged 
by slavery, but it shifted before long to divergent theories 
of government; m the North the doctrine of Federal 
supremacy; in the South the doctrine of State rights. 

But the War grew out of temperamental and social 
differences quite as uuich. Men are coming to see that 
sharp divisions m the forms of life are not wholly due to 
defined beliefs or political statements, so much as local 
situations, needs, economical facts, and, most potently, 
diversity in temperament. The South lived a solitary 
planter's life, feudid as possible in the recent age, with 
retinues liveried by nature in black. It was used to large 
spaces, to agriculture, to sport, to a patriarchal style of 
living. This meant isolation. And isolation meant nar- 
row and tenacious holding of legal rights, individual and 
political. It meant still more suspicion of Federal au- 
thority. The two great theories of political life, once 
held diversely in all parts of America, slowly shifted their 
impression, till the South stood for the more individual, 
and the North for the more social. The South became 
"solid" as a democratic order; the North "solid" as a 
republican. The South was contemptuous of the indus- 
trial North, now fast losing a sense of state consciousness 
in the flood of immigration that washed out many par- 



42 The Temper of the American People 

ticulars of local life; the North was contemptuous of the 
agricultural South. How little either side understood 
the other, the boastings and struggles of that awful time 
fully show. 

Where there are great differences occasion of overt strife 
is always forthcoming. It had been preparing for genera- 
tions. The Southern people were not to blame for the 
existence of slavery; it was a bequest of the older life. 
Their error was in trying to extend its reach; and in re- 
fusing to read the plain signs that no nation in modern 
times can be half free and half slave. Economically, 
slavery was a doomed institution; this indeed the North 
had found out, and part of its morality was thus founded 
on an economic drift. The Southern people might say 
that they treated the negroes well, but that was not the 
issue. The real question was: Shall there be a nation, 
or shall there be a set of differing oligarchies some of 
which may rest on the forced labor of unwilling men? 

As a matter of fact, both North and South too readily 
assume that slavery was the real motive of the War. It 
was only the first occasion. The real matter was the 
threshing out of divergent theories of government, and 
the simplification of the executive disorder in the national 
life. It is the "War for the Union" for most of the men 
who fought in it on the Northern side. Lincoln was at 
first unwilling to estrange loyal slaveholders, and for a 
time he did not believe the people were ready to regard 
the conflict as a war to suppress slavery; they were ready 
to believe it a war to preserve the Union. So, indeed, it 
looks to the man born far from this maddening strife. 
The North cares as little for the negro today as the South, 
or even less; proverbially it does not understand him; 
it treats him a little better in legislation because he is not 
yet numerous. But steadily he is being crowded out of 



The Sense of History in America 43 

employments once open to him and there is a change in 
the attitude of the people towards him. The North, 
however, does care about the Union. 

On both sides, amid a riot of mediocrities and some 
shameless vulgarities, there came into view a few char- 
acters worthy of the earlier ages. These had one quality 
denied their predecessors, — they were purely American. 
In the earlier age Washington himself was not too distant 
from England to bear the marks of an aristocratic society; 
and this makes him somewhat removed from later Ameri- 
can life. But the outstanding characters of the War are 
natively American. Whether we consider Grant or Lee, 
or most of all Lincoln, we discover no parallels in European 
life for the peculiar combination in them of immense 
ability and simple democratic instinct. In the soldiers 
the European misses the martinet training so often as- 
sumed to develop genius; but he is surprised in the end at 
the management of their problems. In Lincoln one would 
find hardly anything in common with the English states- 
men of the time, either in nurture, or in the outer phases 
of the inexplicable thing that we call genius. 

The War ended, won by two great generals, greater 
than human leaders, economic jiower, and the patience of 
the Many. The people were resolute and patient on both 
sides, or the tale had not been so bloody, or so long; but 
one side had the larger resources. In the three men 
named patience stands out as the supreme gift. Grant 
would "fight it out on this line if it took all summer." 
Lee hoped against hope. And the final greatness of 
Lincoln was his steady hold of the confused riddle of things 
till light came. 

No stranger can read the unrolling story of these epic 
years without feeling something of their scope. Still less 
can Americans remember them without the deepest feeling. 



44 The Temper of the American People 

There are two emotions in Americans as they remember 
these turbulent years. One is a feeling of bitterness. I 
have already noticed the ungenerous attitude of America 
towards England: the same surprise moves the observer 
who watches the feeling of the North for the South. At 
the close of the War a horrible decade of " Reconstruction " 
set in, probably the most vulgar period in American 
history. Part of the misery was doubtless due to divided 
counsels, as the President wanted one treatment for the 
South and Congress another. Part was inevitable in the 
change from a feudal to a modern economic system. 
But much was needlessly shameful as cheap politicians 
swooped down on a brave but conquered people to press 
on them the truth that peace as well as war may be "hell." 
Adventurers made their way into the South; carpet- 
baggers gained possession of the electoral machine and 
set about robbing the state most elaborately. They is- 
sued bonds for public works never begun, shared the 
proceeds, and taxed afresh. They gained a bad influence 
over the colored people, many of whom were made magis- 
trates when they could neither read nor write. Justice 
was bought and sold. Hence in the South, it is not the 
memories of the War that embitter the mind when the 
people recollect their disasters; it is the memory of a 
Reconstruction that put at the top of society the ele- 
ments that should have been kept at the -bottom. And 
bitterness yet remains in the North, despite the noble 
friendships of living veterans on both sides; for there are 
frequent protests against remembering Lee monumentally 
as a great American. The "tmy twinkling lustres" of 
the Grand Army are to blame for these periodic outbursts 
of misguided patriotism. Nobler far is the attitude of 
Canada, where both races joined to erect a monument to 
Wolfe and Montcalm, upon which they inscribed the 



The Sense of History in America 45 

splendid epitaph: "Valor gave a united death, History a 
united fame, Posterity a united monument." 

Fortunately, in the more liberal regions of national life, 
the bitterness is dying and gives place to gratitude that the 
evil dream is over. Thus there comes into view the other 
feeling of Americans developed by the memories of this 
epic time, — the feeling of solemnity. The memories of 
the War grow more solemn as time sifts them out. Few 
sights are as pathetic as the marching of the lessening 
ranks of veterans through the streets on Memorial Days. 
The cemeteries are thronged by a crowd lifted up nearly 
into a religious mood, listening to addresses, and decorat- 
ing the graves of the dead who fought for their country. 
Once a year, at the least, patriotism recollects the blood- 
money it cost, and stills a strident rejoicing in tears of 
sympathy. It remembers bravery, and pain, and death. 

The more aloof observer, however, if taken out of the 
crowd and seriously asked how he looks at this epic time — 
how he estimates the characters of its leaders — how he 
conceives the issue, — would feel a moment's hesitation. 

He honors the men who felt their way through a dark 
and dangerous time, for he remembers that courage is a 
prime virtue; but he suspects that they did not entirely 
settle the issues, — that perhaps in some respects they 
added to the confusion. He remembers that whole 
families of the best blood in the nation were blotted out, 
leaving no posterity of genius behind them to decipher the 
perplexities of the next generation. He cannot see why 
economic laws would not have settled slavery as well as 
fighting, since in the new industrialism slave labor would 
be as inefficient as cheap labor is proving to be today. 
He cannot understand why the negroes were left un- 
guided after their deliverance, so that there has been a 
moral and economic descent in the mass of them since they 



46 The Temper of the American People 

were freed. He is surprised at the racial repugnances 
ever in view, — in Boston as elsewhere. And when the 
political question is touched, he still feels that the old 
antinomy of State right and Federal power remains to be 
worked out afresh. As he sees it, the War destroyed 
slavery. Whether it ameliorated the lot of the negro is 
another question, and one of the greatest before the nation. 
Something should have been done in the Reconstruction, 
something needs much more to be done now. For if the 
republic cannot exist half slave and half free, it cannot 
now exist half educated and half untrained in the simplest 
principles of economics and morals. 

The great danger in the modern life of America, so far 
as the bequest of the War is concerned, is that Americans 
will turn their eyes to old solutions of national problems, 
and be unaware of the new dangers. National integrity 
will never be attacked again in the old ways; but it is 
attacked in each generation by the contemporary Mephis- 
topheles, and never more than in our own day, with its 
amazing development of industry, stepping beyond the 
older regulations, — indeed, traveling so fast that it be- 
comes dizzy itself. If, as Ostrogorski asserts, the idealiza- 
tion of material aims bound the country hard and fast 
within the power of party organization after the War; 
it is also likely that great preoccupation with the senti- 
ments of that distant day will become a cover for new 
adventures of base men, as dangerous to the integrity of 
the national life as the mood of irreconcilability that 
brought on the War. 



CHAPTER III 
POLITICAL FEELINGS IN AMERICA 



IT is a continual wonder to those born in a democratic 
society, that the aristocratic orders of Hfejare criticized 
so little, in a fundamental way, in the countries where 
they exist; and that the status quo should be so often ac- 
cepted as a divine right, or gift, not to be meddled with 
except at peril. On the other hand, it is equally surprising 
to the aristocratic mind that in a democracy, where pre- 
sumably all men have their will, there should be so much 
criticism, so much unrest, so many differing judgments of 
political means and ends, so much apparent insecurity. 

Yet I believe these are the facts. And there are reasons 
for them that appear on consideration. The man who is 
born into a society that is aristocratic at the top, feels 
the subtle effect of history, finish, repose, and the social 
security with which the higher characters move, so vastly 
different from his own halting steps. The accent of 
Belgravia is finer than the tongue that he speaks; the life 
is more exquisite. He may start with the radicalism of a 
social sceptic and even go on to rebellion; but he often 
ends by coming to the position of Mrs. Ward's Marcella, 
who, once looking at Mayfair with the rebellion of the 
slums, at last is thankful that the weltering squalor she 
knows so well is not the whole of life, and that yonder 
there are fair demesnes and nobler figures. Even the less 
altruistic person discovers solid advantages in aristocracy. 



48 The Temper of the American People 

as Bagehot remarked, — the advantage of keeping the 
supreme places free from the domination of mere money; 
the social grace, resulting from the dignified manners of 
government filtering down into common life; the play of 
history and imagination mitigating party and material 
ferocity; and the prevention of danger likely to ensue if 
government too easily fell into the hands of those who are 
"too clever by half" — mistakenly brilliant leaders who 
wander on the confines of Bohemia or worse, Belgravia 
has its own thoughts too about the matter; for more than 
one social student has lamented that just when the political 
rebel becomes dangerously effective, all the subtle pressure 
of the older society is brought to bear upon him, its 
doors are thrown open, and in many cases he enters and 
disappears. 

Now the man born in a wholly democratic order is bound 
to think and weigh and criticize in a most serious fashion. 
He looks at the older form of political society and sees 
that it fails to bring its members to really moral ground. 
The state would not need to exist if men were perfect, 
and its greatest work is making those disinclined to per- 
fection step up a little higher than they would otherwise. 
Aristocracy has partly failed because it imposes the morals 
of the few upon the many from without, and is satisfied 
with outward observance in place of inner loyalty. The 
"desperate perfection" of aristocratic life only comes 
because it ignores three quarters of what exists. 

More still does the democrat weigh and criticize him- 
self, for he is engaged in formulating the national life 
himself, and consequently, as the Pragmatists affirm in 
academic ethics, he is more responsible for its smooth 
operation. If there were a half-divine order above him he 
might well let it alone, or stubbornly criticize the acts of 
its sponsors by rote; but he is responsible himself, and 



Political Feelings in America 49 

criticizes with a more tender mind than the man in an 
aristocratic order. Hence the American is more sensitive 
to foreign criticism than the European, not because there 
are so many more grounds for criticism, but because each 
citizen is more responsible for every detail of his national 
life than is the case in other nationalities. The European 
can evade criticism by falling back on the fixed constitu- 
tions of his country, its conventions more fixed still, its 
ingrained habits of thought, its determining weight of 
history. But the American is his country himself. 

And the American is his country in action. His political 
theories tend to come upon the scene of reality with ex- 
traordinary suddenness. The kindly satirist would say 
that all political situations are unexpected. — A country, 
a party, a man, always need "saving." The political 
world is always cataclysmic, its personages in extremis, 
its speech hysterical. But in America this unexpected- 
ness is more dramatic than elsewhere; for the national 
life in respect to size alone is one of the wonders of history, 
and its rapid growth demanded hurried formulations of 
principles as it went along. One problem tumbled upon 
another. Many voices spoke at once. The temper was 
up. All this makes America tremendously self-conscious; 
for the creative sensitiveness, the battle heat, is in the 
blood. Outside criticism is the "last straw." Hotspur, 
we remember, could not abide the neat and trimly dressed 
gentleman who spoke untimely. 



II 

When we turn to the theses of American politics, we 
must first look at those which concern the home policy 
of the state. For American politics are preponderatingly 
home affairs. 



50 The Temper of the American People 

The tirst principle of national life is the right to self- 
government. This was the revolutionary thesis. It is 
the prime stuff of the Declaration of Lidependence. — 
revolt against the state as a maximum. That executive 
power rests upon the consent of the governed, is a principle 
of American life all the way through. A State within the 
federation organizes its owti political commonwealth. A 
town, at the other extreme, is a self-governing corporation 
and lays its local taxes and looks after its interests through 
selectmen. Self-government for the citizens, when con- 
sidered jointly, is as obviously an American principle of 
action as self -direction is an indi%'idual ideal. 

Though a corner-stone in the state, this prime doctrine 
has undoubtedly led to thtficulties m the national life. 
On the one hand, it has made the Federal power, or any 
power, suspected when it attempted to enforce practice or 
order in localized places. "Our Country." when it leaves 
the range of dreams for actuality. — when it comes down 
out of the clouds to demand the practical toll of men, — 
looks less aesthetic than when it remains an abstraction. 
On the other hand, self-direction has accepted poor local 
modes of government when better could be e^isily devel- 
oped. "Solf-goveruuient" has often meiint poor govern- 
ment, weak government, as in the case of riotous com- 
mimities alloweil full licence because the Governor of the 
State was loth to call in Fetieral power to restore order. 
Here the "self" has meant the average self, the mass, 
the mob even, that dances to any piper's tune, so it 
be playeii with power. Still for the most part, self- 
government has meant self-understanduig and self- 
discipline. 

A second thesis, growing out of the foregoing, is the 
rejection of hereditary officials. There were double 
motives for this. One was undoubteiily the pressure of 



Political Feelings in America 51 

tlie monarchy in the early history of America, represented 
by the Colonial governors, and the obduracy of George 
III. Power was fairly lodged in a single executive in a 
simple stage of civilization, but it became too delicate and 
far-reachmg a deposit to be given one man in the later 
stages. England knows this as much as America, and it 
has reduced the power of the monarch to symbolic and 
personal inlluence. Though legally many older powers 
remain, it is inconceivable that tliey should be exercised. 
The other motive was equality. The American refuses to 
think of other men as politically superior, and so definite 
has this attitude become that it affects all the other fields, 
and no one is allowed to assume superiority to others in 
the great mass of American life. Anybody gives his 
opinion on any subject, and ex-cathedra. 

Hence Americans are suspicious of \'ested powers; they 
tend to increase the checks put about office; they are now 
considering the prop>osals of recall. Thus did the old 
Colonial governors IcAve a mark on American history 
that reenforces the natural desire of any man to be thought 
as good as any other. So now in America there must be 
no chosen race, no single fountain of honor, no titles except 
those that represent the work a man is doing, no succes- 
sion by one's self or by one's family. \Miile the President 
usually looks for a second term as a voucher for his ability, 
the strongest man in the state could not gain a third term 
consecutively: an interval is demanded when he loosens 
his grip and allows the other man a "chance." This 
demand affects the smaller details of organized life. A 
deacon in a country church is increasingly refused official 
tenure; he too must fall back as an undistinguished parish- 
ioner for an interval after his term of service. There are 
ways of evading this rule, as a man is given first one 
office and then another; but even with this evasion the 



52 The Temper of the American People 

autocratic power of one man in office for a long time is 
prevented. 

The next determination of America is continental. 
The instinct for a clear continent from sea to sea has 
been ever present in the national life. The various pur- 
chases, intrigues, pressures, and insights that went into 
the development of the national domain afford a history 
hardly illuminated by the high moralities, yet it is the 
outcome of a deep though blind feeling of the mass of the 
people. In this process there were individual critics and 
companies of doubters, but pioneers and statesmen alike 
kept their eyes open to the future. When Louisiana was 
bought from Napoleon; when Texas was taken by threats 
and real war; when California was settled; when Oregon 
was "saved" by Whitman; when "Fifty -four-forty or 
Fight" was the battle-cry of a party, — all these acts make 
plain the determination of America to be a contmental 
state. Later history has justified the foresight, though 
not always the means of gaining the end proposed. And 
still later history has seen some throwing away of the gain, 
especially in defence, by the acquisition of Hawaii, Porto 
Rico, and the Phihppines. 

Another of the historic home policies is that of union. 
In a spiritual sense it had a beginning in the Puritans 
who tried to keep a unity of conscience. With them, to 
know was to act; the outer life must conform to the inner. 
But political unity was slow in following. The Colonial 
distrust of England persisted in distrust of each other by 
the colonies. The States would vest Congress with no 
more power than was absolutely necessary, so that Con- 
gress became a shadow. All that saved the nation not yet 
welded was Washington. But unity prevailed in the end 
by necessity. Three generations later "the War" tes- 
tified to the determination of the people to live up to the 



I 



Political Feelings in America 5^ 

name of the country — the United States of America. 
^Yhatever may come in the future, the wildest visionary 
can never dream of a separated national life. What one 
sees is rather the coming in of other autonomous states 
to strengthen the life of the great republic, and to aid their 
own, — not yet, perhaps not soon, but when America has 
worked out her problems better, and has clean guest-room 
to offer. Economically, she can be mistress of her own 
continent, nay, of her own hemisphere; she needs to be- 
come so ethically, before her destiny is complete. Duty 
is the best tiling that men have in the field of action, 
whether they are considered singly, or as nations. 

In more recent times since the War has lost some of its 
grim fascination, another policy of national life has begun 
to define itself. It is the outcome of the first cry, — for 
representative government, — but it turns to com- 
mercial and industrial life. This is the thesis of control. 
American problems are now business problems, primarily 
corporation problems; and these grow out of the in- 
creasing pressm*e of gTeat organizations on the individual 
and ultimate consumer. The new doctrine is a far cry from 
the laissez-faire of the early industrial day. All at once 
government seems determined to let nothing alone. The 
common man and the professional man, on the whole, are 
with the government in the new policy; but the business 
world is divided on the issue, the smaller men welcoming 
the readjustment, the larger men opposed and crying that 
all will be lost if it proceeds. INIeanwhile the public prose- 
cutor is likely to become the general of the new age, and 
disinterested men look to him for victory in the endless 
war between those who have and those who have not. 

The most recent phase of this determination of the 
people to control, is the policy of conservation of the 
national resources. The national domain is extended as 



54! The Temper of the Ameriean People 

far as it can be; there are now no happy fortunes awaiting 
the explorer; the laud is surveyed and allotted. Urged 
by opinion developed through controversy, the govern- 
ment is reserving some of its holdings in perpetuity, and 
procuring others as time goes on. The exploiters w-ish 
the dispersion to proceed in the old reckless fasliion; the 
scientific onlookers cry for a halt, and the clash of interests 
has aroused intense bitterness. A cabinet officer lost his 
place on the issue, and the end is not yet. for there is much 
to say and much is being said. There is no disposition in 
America, on issues like these, "to fimk a crisis," which is 
a wei\kness alleged agamst England. "Vulgar dread of 
\'ulgar action" does not apply in the conservation con- 
troversy. And it is safe to say that the old national 
squandering of its domain is done. 



m 

When considering the emotions connected with these 
pohtical facts, it should be remarked at the outset, that 
while the pohtical theory of America has been symmetric- 
ally worked out in its several parts, it is a long way from 
coherence as a whole. This is only sa^'ulg, of course, 
what could be said of other political orders. But the 
American citizen is hardly willing to admit the fact as 
readily, for example, as the Englishman, who rather glories 
in his incoherent history, and in the political flux of a 
national constitution that never is, but is "evermore about 
to be." 

Here one is obligeil to remark the superstition of Ameri- 
cans in regard to politics. In the earlier ages morality was 
predominantly political, because only thus could the state 
emerge out of an undifferentiated society; the individual 
had few rights, imd few duties to himself; the idea of indi- 



Political Feelings in America 55 

vidual morality was hardly born. But now morality has 
become individual, with the consequence that pubhc 
morality takes a secondary place, and men who are good 
fathers and sons are often savages when it comes to the 
interests of the state. Politics are not moral in America, 
yet the American blindly expects amehoration to come by 
poUtical instruments. To shout the declarations of free- 
dom and right and expect them to work automatically, 
is only another form of the doctrine of divine right, which 
insisted on the inerrant working of the instrument of gov- 
ernment, and it is a poorer form, as the mechanical is 
poorer than the personal. America needs to chasten its 
will for improvement of conditions, by some hard think- 
ing that shall organize it better, for the problems of 
national life grow in subtlety in each decade. 

Part of this uncritical superstition accepts the consti- 
tutional documents as the extremes of political sagacity 
and foresight. The American has generally been a better 
educated man than the European, and so values the 
document. The European values the personality more 
than the document. The American knows that the per- 
sonality can use a giant's strength tyrannically; but so 
can the document. Pohtical oratory, which has hardly 
changed in seventy years, and the anxious technicalities 
of legal procedure, show some of the effects of the super- 
stition of instruments. One of the most obvious effects 
is confusion, and sometimes this is carried up into actual 
dishonesty. We can see this in the evasions of the Con- 
stitution proposed at times, which are pretended to be 
real developments of its spirit. In law the situation fills 
good men with disgust; for justice seems to be the last 
thmg thought of, — technicality is more and more. 
, Meanwhile, in oratory, the perfervid interpreters of the 

j national life resemble the vender of pills, noted by the 



56 The Temper of the American People 

witty observer of another people, whose great art was not 
in selling his remedies, but in talking so as to make a crowd 
feel sick. Heine calls attention in the " Reisebilder " to 
the instinctive understanding of each other by simple 
men without speech; while the orator with his "expound- 
ing, expectorating, and perorating" misses the mark. 
But in America it is precisely the orator who survives; 
and his stock in trade is too often the worth and the im- 
peccability of public documents, while at the same time 
he is undermining their power. He has felt the necessity 
of holding to an outward consistency, because he had no 
inner virtue of the intellect, and no power of reconstruct- 
ing the dark tangle he lived in, if indeed real baseness was 
not urging him on in his doubtful method. 

Superstitious faith in the document is followed by a like 
acceptance of the party. Loyalty is a good thing, but 
uncritical loyalty, undiscerning loyalty, leads to the last 
ditch. To be "regular," to be "dyed-in-the-wool," and 
"not to kick," have been remarked as the virtues of the 
good party man in America. There are quite as many 
Tories in America as in England, the only difference is 
the form of their Toryism; everywhere the species is the 
same, — the "stand-patter" who stands pat for his own 
interests, or because he is too imaginatively dull to appre- 
hend any other world than the one he was born in. So the 
strict party man in America blindly follows the party 
name and what it covers, totally unaware that it may have 
changed its principles in all respects save one, namely, 
the intention to keep what it gets and to get all it can. 

One might say of party as at present constituted, as 
was said of the English Upper House, — " The cure for 
admiring the House of Lords was to go and look at it." 
So the cure for the strict party man is to go and look at 
the party in its conventions, where mediocrity and phi- 



Political Feelings in America 57 

listinism carry the day. Gratefully do we lately realize 
that this day is drawing to a close. Candidates are 
beginning to see that the questions about themselves are 
shifting, and they are not to be asked so much in the 
future whether they will vote thus or thus, but whether 
they are honest men. And in this there is hope. The 
independent vote is a growing power. 

One more belief carried up to the obstinacy of super- 
stitution in American politics is the belief in the ballot. 
There is an old saying, "There is someone more able 
than Tallyrand, more able than Napoleon. C'est tout 
le monde"; and this saying represents the fundamental 
feeling of Americans. But the only way in which the 
whole world is to be better than Tallyrand or Napoleon 
is for all the world to exert itself at its highest function. 
The ballot reduces the exercises of ability to one function 
only; it puts Tallyrand on the same footing with the 
imbecile, Napoleon in the ranks with the coward. 

While to give the vote to every man seems the most 
direct way of getting the will of men represented, votes 
can be manipulated, bought, and sold. It is questionable 
if "the will of man," which means for those who use the 
phrase the noblest interests of man, is represented by the 
will of all men, and again it is certain that the will of all 
men cannot get represented at all. What happens is 
that the will of a few men who know the methods of 
politics gets represented. The ballot professes to rule by 
majorities, but this it rarely achieves, and when it does it 
is a doubtful good. An English minister looking at the 
unreformed House of Commons once cried, "By Jove, 
they are the finest brute votes in Europe." Votes have 
been brute votes in America too. It is not uncommon 
to find in discussions of this subject by thoughtful men, 
that the feeling is one of discouragement and humilia- 



58 The Temper of the American People 

tion because the vote counts for so little. Of this class 
many abstain from voting at all because they think it 
not worth while. ISleanwhile the unthinking man in his 
political and exuberant moods waves his ballot as a 
royal sceptre. He is right, though m another sense, for 
sceptres are baubles in these days, simulacra of reality. 
In thinking of the ballot as a right the voter forgets that 
it ought to be a means. Until lately, he could merely 
register his verdict on a presented issue, but learning that 
he is only sovereign when he chooses the issue, he is now 
attending to the beginnings of political life in the primary. 
Connected with the general belief in instrumental 
politics in America, is a disbelief in men. The belief in 
the instruments of politics tends to discredit men; for 
the instruments are made in the pattern of the ordinary 
man, and the ordinary man best serves the ends proposed. 
The extraordinary man is apt to break the machine. Thus 
it comes that "politics is perhaps the only profession for 
which no preparation is necessary." Though this is an 
English judgment, the ordinary American citizen would 
probably go further and say that preparation would be a 
disadvantage because it would tend to separate the candi- 
date from his fellow-men. He would think wnth Presi- 
dent Cleveland that he could "find, almost anywhere," 
the man he needed. In the level days of simpler life this 
would be less disastrous than now; but America is pass- 
ing through a time of confusion and does not know what 
to do. The expert time is upon it; but it will not trust 
the expert; instead it trusts the man who listens to its 
o\\Ti confused cry and states it in rhetorical form. It 
doubts the man who would open a new way. Political 
candidates are generally men of faint individuality, and 
they arc obliged to be so as a result of the convention 
system of nomination, which often chooses "dark horses" 



Political Feelings in America 59 

that have made no enemies, because they have been do- 
nothing kings. It is not surprising that, as Ostrogorski 
remarks, their campaign Hves are not much hke Plutarch. 
In the highest places they have been honorable men; but 
apart from their elevation to sudden power, they have been 
frequently unknown. The English know their future 
statesmen better, and "dark horses" as the last hope of 
government are much rarer there. 

American political loyaltj^ it may be remarked further, 
is less a loyalty to contemporary persons than to abstrac- 
tions. The person must be buried to receive the highest 
reverence, other^nse he might presume on the affections 
of men and become a danger to the state. The classic 
heroes are now heroes indeed; though Washington was 
vilified and Lincoln was martyred. The terrible fear 
lurking in the American mind wdth some of the force of 
an aboriginal instinct is fear of the executive. Americans 
learned the lesson of the Revolution almost too well. 
This independence of the executive, and fear of it when 
invested in personality, afiirms a strain in the national 
character not yet quite worked out into nobleness, — or 
perhaps it is another aspect of the confusion of thought 
common in the political life of the nation. It is singular 
that the man who most makes his rulers, as the Ameri- 
can does, is most afraid of them. Time may work out 
this paradox in the demands of a critical moment in the 
national life, but while it lasts it issues in the defect of 
makmg many of the rulers almost the least competent 
men in the state. 

Thus the observer is struck by the persistence of old 
issues, old ways of looking at things, old shibboleths, in 
an age newest of the new. If political issues and the way 
of approach be considered, England within thirty years 
has gone through revolutions compared with which 



60 The Temper of the American People 

America is almost static. America cannot forget its 
political history and this becomes an encumbrance, just 
as tradition encumbers English life socially and economic- 
ally. In some subordinate fields of politics, notably the 
municipal, America is awaking: she also needs to recon- 
sider her national political theories. With impeccable 
doctrines enshrined in impeccable documents, America 
has fallen short of the great expectations that many were 
justified in holding, though she has developed imdoubted 
values in her national life. Her best friends lament this 
failure. But they also believe she ^-ill ultimately tiu-n to 
the business of self-scrutiny with her usual energy, and 
when this happens, she will move forward more securely, 
— that, to use her own vernacular, she ''vnW come out all 
right." 

IV 

It is possible that some of the dangers of American 
home policy may find a corrective in the foreign relations 
now becoming more important in the national life. 

In a certain sense America has been free of the prob- 
lems of foreign policy till a recent day. In Europe there 
is the standing interest in the balance of power among 
the nations, which has no direct relation with the home 
policy, but yet aflects it indirectly, by obstructing needed 
legislation, and by making abihty in extra-national affairs 
the standard of competence for political leaders. For 
three hundred years the term has been in use in European 
pohtics. Until the rise of Napoleon with his fantastic 
threat of invasion, or until the present hysteria as to 
Germany, English action on the Continent was pohticall}' 
objective; that is, she only feared the loss of foreign pos- 
sessions or trade: she never feared the invasion of her own 
soil. America, on the contrary, so far as Revolutionary 



I 



Political Feelings in America 61 

foreign policy was concerned, was not at all interested in 
the state of Europe, but critically interested in her own. 
It was France as an American power that she feared, Eng- 
land as the same, and in the later and varied developments 
of history, other nations as a potential menace of her 
home integrity. The foreign and home pohcies thus 
coincided in the Revolution. 

America wished to be independent, to govern herseh 
and to develop her wonderful domain. She was rightly 
concerned to keep free of European entanglements, and 
to take to heart Washington's sagacious advice when he 
relinquished office, not to be too passionate in the espousal 
of European causes. This definite intention of aloofness 
made America look apprehensively at any attempt on the 
part of Europe to transport its problems to the American 
continent. There was always a possibihty of this, for 
Europe had holdings here, and having fought out some of 
its Em*opean pohcies on this continent it might do so again. 
England was here, France was here, and Spain. South 
of the United States there were no strong peoples though 
there were some growing ones. It might still be possible 
for Europe to develop nationalities on the South American 
continent opposed to American ideals. And when Spain 
interfered in Mexico, the Monroe Doctrine, which affirmed 
in spirit that no European power should increase its hold- 
ings on the American continent, seemed an inevitable thing 
to follow. This doctrine marks the first great principle 
of America in foreign policy. 

A second development in American foreign policy is 
colonial. The colonies of Hawaii, Porto Rico, and the 
Philippines were not sought outright by America. They 
came to her through temporary economic causes and unex- 
pected conquest. Many Americans lamented the fact 
then, and do so now, because of the uncertainty of the 



62 The Temper of the American People 

final issue. But for the mass the final issue is hardly ever 
considered; all that they think of is the flag, which "must 
not come down." The Americans who live in Manila, 
on the whole, are nervously afraid of any recession, or any 
autonomy being granted by America; but this is needless, 
for the general public simply asks for the status quo. 
While the thinkers call colonization an experiment, the 
mass of men take it as a settled fact. 

Another development of foreign policy lies closer at 
hand, in the Panama Canal. In two respects the United 
States is unfortunate, despite its natural advantages. Its 
coast line is divided, and access from one part to the other 
is only possible by a long voyage through stormy seas. 
Further, America faces Cathay as well as Europe. All 
that separated the two oceans, at half the distance or more 
of the voyage round Cape Horn, was a narrow strip of 
land, pervious to engineering skill. Trade called for its 
penetration; so did war. The Spanish War showed the 
diflBculty of getting ships from one ocean to the other, 
while a whole nation watched the lonely voyage of the 
Oregon around the Cape. The general opinion was that 
the risks of that long voyage must be avoided in future, 
and the building of the Canal was more the result of that 
spectacular performance than of the needs of trade. As 
ever, the people willingly spend when defence is in question. 

Once again, the policy of the United States in respect 
to the international trade of the world, now entered more 
critically because of the new approaches of the colonies, 
has been a theoretical insistence on "the open door," 
and a more just treatment of the peoples who are the ob- 
jects of European cupidity. The behavior of the United 
States to Spain in paying for the Philippines, judged by 
past standards, was magnanimous. So was its treatment 
of Cuba, and especially of China. China has cause for 



Political Feelings in America 63 

gratitude, and she manifested it by using the Boxer in- 
demnity, returned by America, to send a stream of her 
students to the United States to learn more about the 
people who had adopted so unusual a policy. Few names 
are likely to stand out in history as nobly as that of John 
Hay, gentleman, scholar, and diplomat, who proposed a 
new principle in international relations and carried the 
nation with him. 

One other American policy remains to be noticed, — 
one of method. It has had a bad name given it, because 
it was expressed too emphatically at first. I refer to the 
"shirt-sleeve" diplomacy which had early expression in 
President Cleveland's Venezuela message. The method 
is strictly American; it is the method of directness. It 
needed the refining pen of Secretary Hay, but the principle 
is sound. It is the principle of the open door carried on 
into method. And it is likely to be adopted as time goes 
on by other governments, who, by the secrecy of diplo- 
matic practice, keep their people on the edge of anxiety 
when there is no reason to do so, and thus store up wrath 
against themselves. 

V 

When we turn to consider the feelings of the American 
people as they deal with these policies, we find general 
unanimity, though a few critics from the thoughtful classes 
point out contradictions. 

The Monroe Doctrine is firmly espoused by the mass of 
the people. The American citizen would resent in the 
highest degree the employment of force to demand terri- 
torial guarantees from any state in the Western hemisphere. 
If England, or Germany, or Holland wishes to collect 
debts from Venezuela, it must not go to the extreme of 
territorial occupation. To land European soldiers on the 



64 The Temper of the American People 

American continent would inflame the people's temper and 
raise it to a heat beyond the control of government, as 
when President McKinley, against his will, declared war on 
Spain. In this case it was not so much the misery of Cuba, 
in itself, that led to war, as that these miseries were caused 
by a European power. The Monroe Doctrine represents 
the deepest instinct of the American people in foreign 
policy. 

The doctrine, when first propounded, was made effective 
by the logical position of America herself, and Europe 
was wise enough to see it; but when America accepted 
Hawaii, and kept the Philippines after the Spanish War, 
the whole situation changed. When America would 
neither allow the Filipinos seK-government, nor give 
them up to any other power, she implied that the Monroe 
Doctrine would apply to them. Her position was that a 
territory once American could never become European. 
A doctrine that might be justifiable and ethical when used 
to preserve the integrity of a home continent, becomes sus- 
pected, when made to cover outlying colonies, as a pre- 
text for immunity, while designs of territorial increase 
are worked out under its cover. It is not only unjust to 
Europe, which manages, in most cases, its colonies as well 
as America; it is also unfair to American meanings; and 
it becomes a grave danger as a possible provoker of 
resentment. 

This policy, further, is suicidal. The original reason 
for the doctrine was the desire to keep America out of 
European entanglements; but it adds to the present con- 
fusion of American thought and policy. The observer 
who looks at its application in South America stands 
amazed. The United States assumes that formal inter- 
vention in South American affairs by Europe is the thing 
to be avoided at any cost, so as to keep clear of the diffi- 



Political Feelings in America 65 

culties of Europe; but in fact German and Italian immi- 
gration into those countries is rapidly building up a set 
of states with European proclivities, and those most 
removed from American ideals. She affirms that no 
European power must be allowed to secure holdings on 
this continent, and meanwhile she allows English and 
German merchants to take the trade of South Ameri- 
can countries and to determine their future affiliations. 
At the same time Mexico, while formally a republic, 
until just lately was in reality a vestige of seventeenth- 
century Spain, and America throws its aegis over it. 
Thus while propounding the Monroe Doctrine rhetorically, 
to keep the continent free of Europe, in reality Europe 
is gaining control of it in the only way that will finally 
count, — in trade and ideals. The doctrine, further, 
becomes reactive on the home policies; for the United 
States is no longer a self-contained nation; it has 
colonial possessions at the most distant remove from its 
own base, requiring larger national defences than ever 
before; and these defences are now pawns in the inter- 
national game. Hawaii and the Philippines have affected 
the policy of the United States towards Japan, and they 
must also affect her policy towards other powers. 

When we consider the American foreign possessions 
we are struck by the fact that they are much more likely 
to develop the extremes of imperial feeling than the 
colonies of European powers; for the American cannot 
look with equanimity on exile from his own land, and 
consequently he does not throw in his lot with the people 
he touches. As Mr. Hobson has said, this is the differ- 
ence between Imperialism and Colonization. The Amer- 
ican colonies are not needed as a field for surplus 
population, for the United States needs all its popu- 
lation to develop its own domain; and the colonies 



66 The Temper of the American People 

themselves offer few inducements to Americans to settle 
in them. 

Still the American feels proud of these dependencies, 
as illustrations of national greatness, and factors that 
put him in the court of nations. Even if costly they 
minister to his pride; but he thinks they are not costly, 
and that they minister to trade. No doubt many people 
are perplexed by the paradox of the government of a 
subject race by a republic with the declared principles 
of America; but most think that the proximity of these 
possessions to China gives the United States some grounds 
for expecting recognition, both at the hands of China and 
Europe. Thus the colonies are thought of as outposts 
of trade and places of vantage in the scramble when the 
Orient is finally "opened up." America expects to sell 
goods and lend money to China because she is next door, 
— can do it freely, — almost with force. 

The story of economic history, however, in recent 
years is plain in one respect, namely, that contiguity 
does not count. America herself has given the most 
striking illustrations of this fact in the treatment of Can- 
ada as a possible customer, and her neglect of South 
America as a great market for her goods. Contiguity 
too often leads to clashing interests and acute phases of 
competition, to scrambles for the same places, to the touch 
of exasperating persons, and to the ignoring of cherished 
traditions. And in the larger issues of national life the 
difficulties of colonial policies are augmented in each 
generation. Any country that begins the colonial game 
today, begins under vastly different conditions from those 
that marked the beginning of the colonial ventures of 
Europe. And here, however blind the ordinary citizen 
is to the implication of national conduct, causes have 
their effects, and the effects are far-reaching. 



Political Feelings in America 67 

The difficulties America sought to avoid, she unwit- 
tingly meets, as she enters the only field where the Euro- 
pean principle of the balance of power is being worked 
out. The old European permutations in politics con- 
cerned the boundaries, weight, and effectiveness of the 
diflferent nations in Europe; but the new combinations 
are worked out in colonial fields and trade. The moment 
America gains interests of a territorial nature in the colo- 
nial field, that moment she too is entangled in the 
problems of the balance of power; and she goes into the 
struggle totally inexperienced, and with a set of national 
principles and ideals at absolute variance with her 
situation. 

As to the Canal, the preponderating feelings of Amer- 
ica in respect to it are military. The spirit of America 
is more military than casual observers would think. She 
has flown to arms because slower modes of action seem 
tortuous, and she desires directness. Her great West- 
ern empire has been a school of courage unequaled in 
the world. She has been invariably successful in her 
military enterprises, whose ends were generally phrased 
in ideal rights, and not in demands for territory. A 
great number of her leading men have been soldiers, and 
the great rewards of political life have often gone to mil- 
itary men. It was inevitable that Washington should 
be President, but it was not necessary that Grant should 
be. Mr. Roosevelt first won his high place, partly be- 
cause he was a reformer, but probably much more because 
he was a Rough Rider; and some of his power in the Pres- 
idency was due to almost military methods of action, 
that appealed to the untutored political imagination. 
Military memories are kept alive by the Grand Army and 
the Sons of Veterans. The year 1910 saw the expendi- 
ture of about 443,000,000 dollars for military expenses. 



68 The Temper of the American People 

including the great sums given as pensions. While the 
army is small and recruiting is slow, the mass of the 
people like military spectacles. Pressure is brought to 
bear on the military authorities by civil officials to have 
soldiers or sailors take part in civil processions; and 
troops of cavalry are sometimes drafted to perform at 
country fairs to impress the crowd, and lend distinction 
to the exhibition. The navy is the pride of the people; 
the President on occasion reviews "seven miles of battle- 
ships"; and a picture of a warship on a lantern-screen 
always draws applause. All this looks like active par- 
ticipation in world events, but alas, in forms most 
indicative of an "effete" system of things. And yet 
America has the one unexampled opportunity in history 
of setting a nobler style, and winning a place as head of 
the hegemony of nations by ethics and not by force. 

Little but praise can be given to the other development 
of foreign policy left to be noticed, — the policy of the 
open door in trade, and the open window in diplomacy. 
Ultimately the open door will settle the most heavy bur- 
dens of militarism; for if trade is free, who would care 
to run the risks of proprietorship, and carry the overhead 
charges? Each nation has enough troubles of its own. 
But America is weak in proposing this policy because of 
her own high tariff boundaries. Some lovers of Amer- 
ica watch the development of this propaganda in the 
hope that it will show the futility of her own economic 
legislation. 

The other phase of this principle is the open conduct 
of diplomacy. Once diplomacy had to be dark, for life 
was dark and incommunicable, and nations did not know 
each other, nor could they tell each other the wistful 
hopes of men. But now we come to another age, when 
the deepest prophets of the soul are as likely to be 



Political Feelings in America 69 

men of another nationality as of our own. The diplo- 
mats cannot keep counsels dark now, and the leakage and 
escape of hints and intentions, rumored by "inspired" 
editors and uninspired idiots, often leads to grave uncer- 
tainties in the national life. If discussion in the national 
life has been a good thing, and in civilized life in general 
has been the mark of progress, why is it not a good thing 
in international life? The American method is the 
method likely to lead to equity in the end, and already 
other nations are coming to see it. It has the promise 
and potency of great good. 



CHAPTER IV 

TEE CONTINENTAL SPIRIT: "OUR COUNTRY' 



WE have already guessed that, in the minds of Amer- 
icans, America does not ultimately mean a local- 
ity, so much as a system of ideas, a traditional way of 
thinking politically, a space for individual action. Patri- 
otism thus concerns itself with the meanings and prin- 
ciples of national life. 

All Americans do not take this exalted view; just as 
all Europeans do not visit the high fields of history when 
thinking of their country. Patriotism, in the case of 
the base European, often becomes a dislike of other lands, 
— a jealousy of what they do or gain, — and as such it 
is, in the words of Dr. Johnson, "the last resort of a ras- 
cal." In the base American, patriotism becomes either 
the opportunity of selfish advancement, or the uncritical 
mumbling of a shibboleth of principles derived, or thought 
to be derived, from the Founders. 

But in its nobler meaning, "Our Country" implies 
for Americans the tried procedure of national life, and 
the loyal acceptance of the solemn declarations of the 
national heroes concerning national experience and des- 
tiny. American patriotism is thus peculiarly intellec- 
tual and ideal. But it needs a place where it may work 
itself out, a laboratory where it may try itself. 

The American continent where these ideas developed 
affords this great laboratory. Here the most fluid mod- 



Continental Spirit, ''Our Country'* 71 

ern ideas, as well as the fixed declarations of the earlier 
days, find a continent wonderfully acquiescent in work- 
ing them out. In a sense, until lately, there were great 
regions so neutralized by the lack of history, or even of 
population, that almost anything could be tried without 
grave risk to the national life. There could be, for ex- 
ample, a kingdom within a kingdom, as Salt Lake City 
was quite recently. Or there could be other experiments, 
doctrinaire, or fantastic as the case might be, where 
" come-outers " might erect some little society with a 
free hand, untroubled by the common life of the nation 
that stood at too distant a geographical remove to affect 
them. But the continent was still more acquiescent 
towards the legitimate developments of American life, 
when new populations, beset by new circumstances, 
kept the old traditions of history and the old political 
longings. In these examples the old had to be modi- 
fied to fit the new and imperative needs, without, 
however, ruining the essential continuity; often indeed 
it was aflSrmed that the essential continuity was not 
touched. 

All this brought into light some new contributions to 
political philosophy and helped to make America an amaz- 
ing theater of social experiment. The experimentation 
has not always been finally successful, because it has 
been too close to the instant demand and lacked time 
for the complete development, or it was not infrequently 
under the direction of incompetent or visionary persons, 
and always it was modified by the steady pressure of an 
unsympathetic invading population. But like the spon- 
taneous variations of biology, the fittest survives, espe- 
cially when the fitness consists in a double adaptability, 
— to the new environment, and to the old invading 
order. 



72 The Temper 0/ ihe American People 

n 

The Amencan feefaig for "Our Corartrv,'* thou^ not 
strictiv material, lias a mateiiaJ basis, and the great^t 
the world has seen- The American often lavs so much 
stress on this fact that he obscures for the foreigner, and 
sometimes for himself, the more subtle spirit behind the 
phenomena. 

The area of the TTnited States affords an easv excuse 
for political giorificatian when popular orators catch the 
long ears of the groundlings; it likewise become an easy 
introduction to reformatory speeches that deal with the 
moral 01 religious problems of the country. On high days, 
in popular assemblies not lacking in earnestness, the ex- 
tent of the country is described in grandiloquent terms. 
Single territorieB are sun^eyed and then found to be large 
enough to contain several European states. And the 
native humorists only limit the national boundaries by 
*' chaos and the Day of JudgmenL" The immense 
stretch^ are the theme of every traveler. San Fran- 
cisco is to Boston as Boston is to London; Minneapolis 
is to New Orleans as London is to Constantinople. 

The native-bom joins with Mr. Wells in thinking of 
America as "stiE an unoccupied country," and he agrees 
with Professor Miinsterberg in picturing its "huge ex- 
tenL" Yet this affirmation is only superficially true. A 
traveler throu^ New England desiring to purchase an 
abandoned farm, alwaj's finds there is an o-wner, and 
often a fair price, attached to the property. I well re- 
member a youthful companion awaking in his travels one 
day to the fact that " somebody owned fr:*^ foot of land 
in the country.*' America is unoccupied only in a rel- 
ative sense. Immense thougt the area is, the popula- 
tion is pressing upon it for subsiBtence, and more careful 



Continental Spirit, ''Our Country'' 73 

methods of agriculture are required. Under the new 
agricultural methods sparse popidations do not mean 
unoccupied land. The farms of Iowa have gone up in 
value 120 per cent in ten years, and tliis with a station- 
ary population in the State. The recent dismay in sev- 
eral Western States over the Federal conservation policy 
indicates that some people iire awiire of closing doors 
and limiting bounds; and the recent rise in the cost of 
li\^ng has pressed the fact home to still more. 

In spite of these curtailing factors, often ignored, the 
productiveness of the United States is immense, not oiUy 
in quantity, but in variety. The continent form of the 
great oblong blinds the European to the diversity of its 
products, since the different zones merge into each other 
unenforced by political boundaries and liistories as marked 
as those of Europe. The Northern wheat-tields are 
matched by the Southern cotton-tiolds; the apples of 
New England by the oranges of California. The climate 
is sub-arctic in xAJaska, sub-tropical in Florida. There is 
no need of going into details; but America ciui grow 
almost everything that any otlier coimtry can produce, 
and many things that some cannot grow at all. Year 
after year the crop is a "bumper." In nituiy regions the 
soil is so productive that for years the most wastefid 
methods of farming have yet been profitable. 

There are also to be added to tlie agi'icultural resources 
the wealth of forest and mine. The forests are getting to 
be less extensive, owing to wasteful niodos of cutting; and 
tlie Federal Government is now concerned to halt the 
thoughtless exploitation, by statutes controlHng the work- 
ing and preservation of the national reserves. Educa- 
tional institutions are also aiding by de^•eloping a science 
of forestry. 

Within the earth's crust the wealth of America goes 



74 The Temper of the American People 

beyond Sir Epicure Mammon's dream. The new race 
of kings are those who rule subterranean empires: coal 
barons, silver kings, copper kings. Oil has caused the 
face of man to shine, — and of late to frown. Sudden 
''bonanza** wealth dug out of the earth or gushing from 
its veins, has led to extreme examples of American soci- 
ety, too often construed by Europe as typical of the 
whole people; and it has led to economic maladjustments 
at home, and the pains that accompany any shifting of 
the industrial equihbrium. 

Besides these treasures of the soil there are the inland 
waterways that contribute to the power and wealth of 
America. The early struggles to obtain control of the 
Ohio and Mississippi show how the pioneers estimated 
the worth of these natural means of commerce. On the 
inland waters of America sail navies larger than the coast- 
wise fleets of some of the European nations. 

Within two decades the greatness of these continental 
resources has been illustrated by the emergence of the 
South from the wrecks of the Ci^il War. As we have 
seen, the South was framed in a feudal or patriarchal 
society hundreds of years behind the times. It was 
wholly agricultural. Its slave labor was economically 
wasteful so that it could not cope with the free and tense 
labor of the North. In the war it had been stripped 
clean by illegitimate devastation as well as the p)ermitted 
exactions of the military life. It had lost the flower 
of its population, so that even today States hke Kentucky 
fail to realize their early promise, for the noblest youth 
was killed and the intellectual continuity was broken. 
Its spirit had been h umili ated by the sullen oppressions 
and memories of the Reconstruction, Yet the South is 
prosperous today, and has a future commensurate with 
other parts of the nation. 



Continental Spirit, ''Our Country" 75 

in 

"Our Country," however, for the American who is 
reasonably intelligent, is not merely this vast and pro- 
ductive domain. 

The nearest conception of nationality based on geog- 
raphy, for the American, Hes in his amazing taste for 
natural scenery. If he is hardly awakened to the play 
and power of the fine arts, he is more awake than any 
other man to the extraordinary effects of landscape. He 
will go further than most men to see natural beauty. 
He will visit new manifestations of it as his means allow. 
It becomes almost a rehgion to him, as to a Words wort h- 
ian; only, the American chooses rather the large, the inde- 
terminate, the sublime. He seeks the desert spaces, the 
prairies, the wide rivers, the highest mountains, the 
broadest effects. And when he goes to Europe to steep 
himself in history, he still considers landscape as an 
important end in his travels. The Alps, the Tyrol, the 
"wind-gashed Apennines," the roses of Sicily, the blue of 
the yEgean, the stern landscape of Spain, the willows and 
poplars of France, the meadows of Warwickshire, — all 
these the traveled American knows perfectly, and loves. 
But he also knows and loves the silences of his own for- 
ests, the roar of his own cataracts, the mystery of his 
own deserts and mountains. 

StUl, again, this love of landscape is not at all the 
European feeling for a particular place, a locality, a city 
(as in the case of France), where one first felt the kindly 
familiars of life, and beautified them by an unspoiled 
imagination that appareled everything in celestial light, 
whither amid the fatuities and struggles of middle life 
one would wish to return and be at peace. The American 
locality grows too fast for recollection; the old marks 



76 The Temper of the American People 

get swiftly obliterated. Sometimes, as in New England 
hill towns, the outer shell is left, inhabited only by the 
aged and unambitious, emptj' of the tides of human life. 
A place does not remain so much the same as in Europe; 
and whether prosperous or decadent it loses its charms 
sooner, for the marks of American civilization are largely 
utiUtarian, and therefore temporaiy*. No weight of his- 
tory can be remarked in its sunivals. The survivals 
common in Europe swiftly disappear in America. In 
the new land growth is sprawling, huge, and im.gainly; 
decay is not picturesque, for Nature has not had time to 
cover up with beauty in her own slow way the woimds 
inflicted by man. Only in a few places does America 
find the consolation of the Euroi)ean, who. if his locahty 
changes, yet keeps an immortality of history, and hears 
the choir invisible amid the more strident voices of the 
day. The local American history, in the larger part of the 
country, is the story of the man who "succeeded." But 
to be rich or to hold office is not to become a protagonist 
of history, or the figure about which sentiment embroiders 
its immemorial tales. Such an eminence is merely vulgar. 
Thus the American does not think of his country in 
the localized form that determines the European concep- 
tion. He has not been planted long enough. Nor has 
he been subject to the imperatives of history as the 
Italian, for example, who is first of all a ^Milanese or a 
Siennese, and then an Italian, because centuries ago Lom- 
bard dukes founded a score or more different states. The 
listener who hears the American in his expansive moods 
feels that "Our Country" means something generous, — 
an opulent maximum. If the American does not know 
the aromatic pain of the European who severs himself 
from the Uttle place he loves, whether a hamlet, or a city 
with twisting streets, the European can hardly know the 



Continental Spirit, ''Our Country" 77 

expansive feeling of the American in his agrarian moods. 
The Enghshman even, when most imperial in his think- 
ing, cannot have this feehng, for his empire is divided 
by estranging seas. It is made up of lesser breeds without 
the law, it speaks a babel of tongues, it is held only by 
the exercise of power. But the American's "country" is 
nearly homogeneous and contiguous. The Enghshman 
holds his country in his grasp; the American is held by his. 

In other words, "Our Country" means to the Ameri- 
can a more dynamic thing than the term would mean 
to the Englishman, or perchance to other Europeans. 
The Englishman's country is an "old country" and has 
much of the static about it, perhaps the regressive, or 
even the elegiac. So much of it lies in the past, it can- 
not wholly free its energies, nor look unblinded to the 
dawn. WTien it is dynamic it is mihtary, or colonial; 
and both these modes of expression are peripheral rather 
than central. But to the American, America is something 
in the making. Land and climate he has had given him, 
all the rest he does himself; and his happiness is to labor 
at the self-appointed tasks of reahzing, with the instru- 
ments he can make, a society where social improvement 
and individual distinction are the double goals of his 
democratic purpose. Often he is over-emphatic, gener- 
ally he is uncritical, occasionally a positive fool; but his 
attitude is d;yTiamic; he conceives in terms of energy. 

We thus again come to the country as a continent. 
The continent as a presupposition is a steady habit of 
the American mind. The size of the country, its indeter- 
minate emptiness outside of agricultural exploitations, 
demands energy. The American loves his country as a 
continent. He is learning its values by pacing it ofiF. 
The Englishman goes to the Lakes, or North Wales; but 
the American starts to Florida or CaUfornia. The small 



78 The Temper of the American People 

business man, the widow, the school-teacher of New Eng- 
land, will go to the Pacific coast for a vacation. While 
these do not meet the varied life of European localities, 
they are able to get into the closest intimacy with what 
they meet, and they come back in an expansive, nay, 
even generous mood. The teacher may buy a house lot 
in a Coast city before she returns, for though distant it is 
all one country, and has similar modes of thinking and the 
same economic bases. Thus does the American citizen 
venture on the future of his country, unsupported by a 
syndicate. He feels the continent solidly beneath him. 

These continental terms of thought are not recent. 
We have seen them as an American instinct from the 
start, — in truth an American idealism. The early col- 
onies very soon began to be aware of the hinterland and 
to feel for it darkly. In pre-Revolutionary days dissat- 
isfied citizens moved westward to be free of possible inter- 
ference from England; and ever since, the pioneers have 
been traveling into unsettled regions, taking into remote 
parts a lengthening thread of connection that becomes a 
web in time. So the continent grows into a presupposi- 
tion of the national life; the new is vitally related to the 
old. And this connection is still more emphasized by 
the geographical system of political representation, which 
is followed even in voluntary assemblies of reformatory 
and religious bodies. The delegates do not represent 
the consummate flower of the life of the organization, 
for the best men may be congregated in a particular local- 
ity; but they represent the "country," and the country 
must be recognized. 

IV 

Thus the American feels "Our Country" to be a theater 
of free activity, — in the worn hortatory phrase of per- 



Continental Spirit, "Our Country^^ 79 

plexed moralists, — "an opportunity." It invites and 
he answers. Activity as an ideal is an obsession in the 
American mind, the more perfect state of being. A good 
holiday consists in "doing something," not in resting, 
still less in seeking contemplation as a bride. The more 
kinds of activity crowded into the day, and the swifter 
the change in its forms, the better. And the American's 
ideal of work is as consistent. Indeed, the American's 
work is his play. So far, he has not grown tired of his 
play, because the very accidents of his situation have 
thrust new modes of activity upon him before he has 
wearied of the old. 

It is true that industrialism is beginning to mark the 
factory populations with physical and moral weariness; 
and agriculture in some of the longer settled places be- 
comes a sordid misery, as Mr. Hamlin Garland's stories 
pathetically show; but in general the American finds 
stretching before him great remainders of the national 
estate not yet completely exploited and demanding 
exploration. The continent thus becomes a vast play- 
ground, where the play partakes somewhat of the im- 
mense seriousness of childhood, and also of its swift and 
unreasoning changefulness. Results, of course, are always 
kept in view, but they are not the finalities reserved for a 
sleepy old age; they are rather milestones along the way 
that the worker traverses to his far-oflf and undefined end. 
The American does not "settle down" or "retire." If he 
does he loses the respect of his fellows: at least he should 
be in politics or philanthropy. 

In other words, the American finds his country the 
foundation of continuously new experiences. This at 
bottom is what he desires and what he generally gains. 
In respect to the varieties and successions possible in ex- 
perience America is not merely a New World; it is a New 



80 The Temper of the American People 

Life. Something of the freshness of a dream is still upon 
it; it is a place where things may happen. It is not 
simply an untroubled hoard of riches. Of course, the 
monumental wealth of the country is a striking thing, 
piled up in a self-contained state, not by conquest, nor 
by the exploitation of subject peoples, but by free labor, 
an arduous discipline, and a demonic energy. But the 
observer has failed in the rudiments of American civiliza- 
tion who affirms that this wealth is the main thing. 
Money is not a substantial good; it is the new symbolism 
of powers well applied, an understanding of the universe 
a man lives in, a means. 

The American esteems money as money less than the 
Englishman of equal station, — less than the French 
rentier. If he speaks of what things cost there may be 
some aesthetic feeling in his mind; for, as Professor San- 
tayana observes, if you go behind the mathematical for- 
mula of cost and perceive the labor, struggle, and hazard 
involved in costly things there is decided aesthetic senti- 
ment connected with "expensiveness." It is this aesthetic, 
or rather moral power, behind the material formula 
of it that lies in the American's mind, one surmises. 
The stock examples of Americans suddenly rich who buy 
books or pictures by the yard can be matched anywhere. 
Lady Randolph Churchill gives a striking English instance, 
in her "Reminiscences," of a rich man who bought "a 
grand picture" for eight thousand pounds, and could not 
remember who painted it, or what it was about, but was 
sure it was "eight feet by twelve." 

The American, then, means by his country the field of 
personal development, — the experience of many phases 
of life. This ministers to his sense of power. His con- 
tinent has called power into being; and it demands the 
continual exercise of this subjective good. No wonder 



Continental Spirit, ''Our Country" 81 

that he glories in a land where so much has come to him, 
whose resources are the spur of undiscovered faculties, 
and whose political theories enforce his native individual- 
ism. Exercise of muscle and brain has its own peculiar 
joy, and the American has tasted this happiness as no 
other man. lie rejoices in the field where the testing 
came; he is glad when others are opened where it may be 
continued. 

Moreover, because of the rapid growth of the country, 
and the swift development of science and invention par- 
allel with it, the kinds of power demanded are more di- 
verse than elsewhere. And the fluid conditions of life 
also make it easy for one man to experience many of the 
different orders of strength. Hence the American, in 
spite of his incessant labors, does not wear out as easily 
as the European, who becomes old through hopelessness, 
or falls into a slothful content that by degrees makes him 
decrepit in will. The American works longer, to a later 
age; he has hardly yet begun to feel the monotony of 
labor or business. In a measure this is why he is indif- 
ferent to the arts, for he does not yet feel the need of 
their solace. The conquest of his continent is a fine 
art to him. He thinks he has little time to give to medi- 
tate on aesthetics. He spares a little for politics, but not 
enough to get at first principles, or to carry out remedial 
measures to a completion. He is essentially uncritical 
because he is laboring so intensely. And he makes labor 
per se an obscuring idolatry. His joy of living is a joy 
in working, that exceeds the patient laboriousness of 
Europe; and the clan that Europe keeps for military and 
social life he keeps for work alone. 

One would err, again, to think of all this demonic 
labor as emptied of meaning, or simply the automatic 
reactions of a highly nervous organization to a highly 



82 The Temper of the American People 

stimulating environment. We must never forget the 
idealism of the American. Hence his joy in working is 
edged and urged by interior visions of what he would 
see in the outer fields of life. Nor must we forget his 
headlong uncritical habits that prevent him from sifting 
his dreams and trying his spirits. Unfettered, and per- 
haps also unsteadied by long traditions, unobstructed by 
a static organization of life weighted with unintelligible 
remnants of historical forms, he looks over the great 
fields of the national domain and dreams of what may 
come to pass there. And his dreams are real dreams, — 
not the logical ordering of a waking mind, — swift suc- 
cessions of experience, jumbles of ideal meanings, frag- 
mentary insights, a moving panorama of things hitherto 
widely separated in the historical experience of civilized 
man. Though he may be reasonably well situated, he is 
apt to move on. He leaves his farm and goes to a place 
on the confines of a well-ordered life, or he leaves his city 
or business and takes up a new life in a distant place. 

It seems as though the American could not rest till he 
gets his domain settled in the fashion of the older states. 
His concept is largely that of duplication. Looking over 
an undeveloped region he seems to say: "Here is a good 
place for a city; twenty years will do it; let us build a 
railroad, invest capital, organize a State, realize ourselves 
as wills in action." It is far from his way of thinking 
to make things that are known and old better by slow 
change, for this would lessen his own life as he subjected 
himself to the dictation of men and things already estab- 
lished. On the contrary, he goes where the materials of 
empire are plastic to his hand. 

Ultimately "Our Country" means for Americans a 
contributory non-ego reenforcing "ourselves." It is 
where life can be lived most intensely in active and reac- 



Continental Spirit, ^'Our Country^'' 83 

live terms. It is contributory environment, not consol- 
atory, as often is the case in Europe. It does not mean 
repose on a mother's breast, or secure quiet in a father- 
land, but invitation and enforcement to the individual 
will. "Our Country" means the places where a man has 
"made good," and it may include the people who have 
been associated with him in the process. Still more it 
means the framework of social and political ideas in which 
he is free to realize himself. But most of all it means 
the other half of himself. For the ultimate country of 
democracy is man. 



While the nobility of many of these conceptions is evi- 
dent, and the generosity of the American temper appar- 
ent, there are some extravagances of virtue that come near 
to vice. And to get a just appreciation of the national 
life we must take into consideration a few of these 
extremes. 

The American life for a great number of its people is a 
life of uncharted freedom. One always feels something of 
the thinness of the persistent traveler who never is but 
always to be blessed. The relation with fellow-pilgrims 
is not sustained enough to lead to permanent good. Yes- 
terday one did not know them, today they give one a 
conventional word, tomorrow they will be far away. 
Mind and soul have thus no chance of rooting themselves 
and becoming a quivering part of the social organism. 
Society is hardly worth while when its constituents van- 
ish in anight. "Our Country," as we have seen, is a 
conception reenforcing the individual will; but the social 
will is hard to realize. Politically, America is a land 
of "reconcilable antagonisms," but socially it is less 
reconcilable, because it is too fluid in its motion. Im- 



84 The Temper of the American People 

mense individualism, and the feeling of transit, alike 
prevent the finer social relations, as in places where 
the people know that they must make the best of each 
other for a long time, perhaps for life. There are few 
"impossible loyalties" carried out to the romantic con- 
clusions. The American is not yet ripe enough for the 
finest social results. 

All this individualism, moreover, prevents the long and 
generous view of life that some older orders of society 
possess. The American is most generous of his mate- 
rial riches, but he is not pervious to the sympathy that 
interprets the oldest and most human civilizations. 
America does not go far enough back in seeking her ori- 
gins, and this leads to a certain rawness in her modernity 
that enforces her utilitarianism. She would do well 
to be more reverent of localities and of persons. With 
all her interest in history she misses being truly historical, 
because she will not lean on the steadying powers that 
come from a generous knowledge of other people's epic 
labors. Greedy of experience, it is her own that solely 
counts, and thus she keeps too often a closed circle in her 
thinking, and is subject to the tremulousness of a youth 
too long continued, which has not awakened to the fact 
that other men also met great problems and tragic issues 
and survived. All remnants of a past life she should 
sedulously keep, for they give meaning to life and spur 
the imagination; they also console life by inviting it 
from present labors and refresh it for other deeds. Amer- 
ica stands now on the edge of consolation. She too must 
know more and more the world-pains of older politics 
and society, and she will need to find her consolations in 
the dramatic and elegiac sources that issue from the 
heart of older life. 

American enthusiasm has had a long and noisy day; 



I 



Continental Spirit, ''Our Country" 85 

its optimism is uproarious and on the whole a little too 
mechanical to be wholly sincere. It is based on the 
idea of a "great country," but the country has blots upon 
it that some believe would damn an older state. She has 
been forgiven much because she was young; but youth 
has, or should have, the purest dreams. Her youth is 
not only, as Oscar Wilde said, her oldest tradition, it is 
also her severest judge. She only has one obligation, 
that of environment, whereas Europe has two, — envi- 
ronment and habit. To some she appears to be "a vast 
reservoir of raw energy poured into moulds of compli- 
cated shape, without grace, modulation, or reticence"; 
and her complacent optimism is a source of exasperation. 
In these matters something is to be taken from the total 
of her praise. 

Moreover, American generosity, so large and notable 
in the superior instances, and so widely spread among 
the general citizens, leaves out the final good. The Amer- 
ican dispenses largess with a prodigal hand; but it is an 
abstract generosity; he has not often given his soul. 
Almost anybody can get money from him for philan- 
thropy; he willingly allows committees to decide how 
much and for what he shall give; but somehow there 
is an essential lacking. English and Germans frequently 
report that Americans are more honest than they ex- 
pected, much more generous, but that they are not easily 
made into friends. A cultivated German, after ten years 
in the countrj% said, "The Americans are cold." It is 
this temper that affects the culture of the country, which 
is too mechanical and abstract. The American gets his 
tools together, but he has not learned how to use them 
effectively, so that people who have had "opportuni- 
ties" of education and travel are often cool and precise 
in their learning, or absolutely unable to relate it to the 



86 The Temper of the American People 

larger histories of the world of men. Pedantry in art 
as well as a commercial mode of thinking has weakened 
American culture. 

Once more, "Our Country" too much becomes an 
idolatry for great numbers of citizens, thus precluding 
the larger reverences of personality and religion. Amer- 
ica is a religion as no other country is. Though the 
American will on occasion admit the goddess to be 
maimed, she yet preempts the deeper reverences of men. 
After years of residence one still wonders at the absorb- 
ing nature of this worship, and that a country so reverent 
to its abstract personifications is so irreverent to its con- 
crete personalities. Individual rights are fought for but 
they are not respected. Each man seems to be in the 
struggle to get all he can and to give as little respect as 
possible. The shouting and the tumult does not die, 
the captains and the kings do not depart. In Europe 
there are physical indecencies that revolt the observer, 
happily absent in America; but there are intellectual and 
emotional irreverences in the new land that are almost 
as astonishing. 

VI 

A truce, however, to these damnatory clauses. They 
refer only to the darker currents in the general stream. 
And the stream on the whole is clear. 

American faith in "Our Coimtry," though carried to 
the verge of irrationality, has worked out pragmatic re- 
sults, and is bound to work out more. On the whole, 
the optimism is justified; anyhow it still persists and de 
facto tends to become de jure. The American faith in 
"Our Country" has been the instance of giving a country 
to many men who would not have had a country in any 
other way. It has been the promise of national life to 



Continental Spirit, "^Our Country** 87 

many of the dispossessed peoples of the earth. The 
open door was due in part to the expectation of economic 
good Hkely to result to the American, but more still to 
an inherent generosity with the good things of life that 
has always been a mark of the American at his best. 
He is ready in his national life to "get others in on the 
ground floor." When there they could help him, but 
they could help themselves still more. Were it not for 
the American's faith in his country there would have been 
a much smaller ground floor than there is. If, also, his 
faith had been less secure that his country "would come 
out all right in the end," he would not have let so many 
into his national domain. The value of faith is thus 
shown by its works; the will to believe creates a reality 
in the end. 

The American "self" or "individual," further, is not 
the bare self that some observers have alleged. He is 
not the avaricious man or the brutal man. He has his 
own peculiar virtues. And one of these is readiness. He 
is likely to fall on his feet much more than the European. 
He seems instinctively to know the point of approach. 
All his constructive powers are under control so that when 
he calls spirits from the vasty deep they come. The 
American can be trusted in any unusual situation more 
than any other man. This power is partly due to chan- 
ging climate, for as Nietzsche observed in one of his san- 
ities, changeable climate prepares men for innovations 
and breaks up too rigid habits; and it is also due to the 
changing situations of men in America. But the national 
readiness is most of all due, I think, to the troubled blood 
of the man himself. Beyond him is a changing environ- 
ment; within him is a hereditary ferment. He is bound 
to be ready. Sometimes this virtue is carried beyond 
reason and then becomes mere "smartness," when a man, 



88 The Temper of the American People 

for example, seeks the unusual needlessly just to conquer 
it, or meets a situation by superficial wiX rather than 
inward comprehension. But the satellite vice indicates 
the presence of the real virtue. 

Ultimately the faith and readiness of the American, 
as directed to the country and developed by it, comes 
to courage. The American is a brave man. He does not 
color his bravery with the trappings of earlier times, with 
crests and designations; nor does he make it attractive 
by an ancient mannerliness; but the genuine stuff of 
virtue is there. It is a racial bequest to him from Eliza- 
bethan times, worked out by the addition of venturesome 
souls ever since, and demanded by his tremendous cir- 
cumstances. The American has felt the aboriginal forces 
and the cosmic weather; he has directed the political 
passions of men; and he faces a future big with destiny. 
In these situations he has done his duty, perhaps given 
his life, always rendered his judgment, and ever looked 
for a greater good. He has left the security and conso- 
lation of a known locality to traverse mysterious spaces 
and to die alone and unrewarded. He has mixed in the 
polygot melee that gathers on the edge of civilization, or 
patiently waited for his agriculture to ripen. He has 
lost fortunes with equanimity and then set about making 
others. He has been a public hero on the field of battle, 
still more heroic in his return to private life, where he 
followed the plough and took up the common duties 
again. And in all these experiences he has contributed 
no small part of the sum of his life to "Our Country," 
which for him and his fellows, at bottom, is the sum 
total of individual experiences possible within it, working 
one upon another for the greatest personal and common 
good. 



CHAPTER V 

THE ESTIMATE OF POPULATION 



AT the head and front of national life there stands 
the fact of population as a source of interest and 
strength. But the estimate of this fact is vastly differ- 
ent in each age; and in the same age different races look 
upon it differently. 

In the oldest time, with a world all before it, a race 
looked upon a posterity as a great desideratum, though 
it was esteemed only as a vague and general good, reck- 
oned in terms of mass, as tribe overcame tribe by mere 
weight of numbers. The savage man was far below statis- 
tical interests or methods. But while he calculated re- 
sults rather than means, he had a dim feeling that a tribe 
was a community of souls as well as a combination of 
forces, and he tried by reckoning kinship as the basis 
of naturalization, either real or assumed by a ritual pro- 
cess, to permit the enlargement of his people, and to denote 
the bounds of tribal relationship. The circumcision of 
the Hebrew proselyte stands as a typical ritual illustra- 
tion. The tribe was not enlarged by a conquered terri- 
tory with people upon it; the outsider must in some way 
enter into the blood and spirit of the clan or tribe. Men 
were "adopted" into the tribal or national life. 

Yet there was no interest in the number of the people 
as such; or if there was it was deemed irreligious, as in 
David's numbering of the people; for there was every- 



90 The Temper of the American People 

where in older times the fear of the gods who might find 
man too strong and so put him down from his mighty 
seat. \Yilliam James cites a case in point, in the letter 
of a Turkish cadi to Sir Austen H. Layard, who desired 
to know the number of the population in the cadi's prov- 
ince. "Although I have passed all my days in this place," 
the letter runs, "I have neither counted the houses nor 
enquired into the number of the inhabitants; and as to 
what one person loads on liis mules and the other stows 
away in the bottom of his ship, that is no business of 
mine. . . . There is no wisdom equal unto the belief 
in God. He created the world, and shall we hken our- 
selves unto him in seeking to penetrate into the mysteries 
of his Creation?" 

The fact of population was supremely important in the 
early consciousness. To have a posterity counted for 
much in an unoccupied or a hazardous world; and to 
begin a tribe or nation, or to enlarge it, made a man a 
benefactor of succeeding ages. This was "success"; and 
the patriarch was likely to become a mythological deity, 
besides being a rich and influential man during his life. 
Yet there always attended this development an exquisite 
fear that the gods took notice. Man must not show his 
riches or the gods would take them; and the number of 
the tribe should not be known, at the most it should only 
be guessed. 

The populations that move through history hke tidal- 
waves, pressing over the adjacent regions, and often 
destrojdng civilization, necessarily could not be as great 
witliin a definite locality, as the later populations that 
began a more settled life and learned how to protect it. 
As Pascal said, most of the evils of life come of the inabil- 
ity of man to sit still, — his hunger, liis disease, his war. 
The "settler" began a permanent style of life, and devel- 



The Estimate of Population 91 

oped ability to tide over inclement seasons, shortage in 
food, as well as to erect defensive barriers, insuperable to 
unfriendly masses that must snatch immediate victories 
if victory came at all. Larger populations could now live 
on smaller territories. Intensive civilization began. 

Industrialism, aided by science, has carried this inten- 
siveness still further; for the man who sits still can make 
the instruments needed by the man on the frontiers of 
nature, and by fitting him with clothing and tools can 
make his labor far more productive and continuous, and 
so push the bounds of subsistence further off. Indeed, 
this mode of life has been so effective that it moved the 
imagination of the men stiU on the frontiers of nature, 
and we now face a third movement in the rhythm of the 
transit of population, as the workers in the fields are no 
longer willing to stay there, but flock to the cities in 
growing numbers, deserting the land, and by inbreeding 
with the city popidation weaken their own native 
stock. 

To the European who is imperial in sentiment, and col- 
onizing in method, the great modern advance in the num- 
bers of population brings a sense of national greatness, 
and a feeling of national splendor. The thoughtless 
Englishman desires increase in city and nation, but from 
the time of Thomas Love Peacock or Malthus to the pres- 
ent there are those who see in these ever-enlarging numbers 
a certain access of difficulty in the problems of social or- 
ganization. What if the forty millions turn out to be 
"fools," as Carlyle suggested.'' What if idleness is the 
chronic condition of larger numbers than ever before? 
What if the percentage of pauperism increases? WTiat 
if the mass inevitably stratifies so that social and individ- 
ual contacts grow less possible? What if, instead of each 
man upon his rood of ground, there is a herding of narrow 



92 The Temper of the American People 

foreheads, debased stamina, a cheap and brutal vulgar- 
ity, an apathetic waste of life? 

Questions like these haunt England, where population 
has pushed its most difficult problems to the front, in 
an order of society more industrialized than elsewhere. 
There is a grave, almost a tragic, note in English social 
discussions, because of these conditions. And the sym- 
pathetic observer is affected by Mr. Masterman's query 
as to whether "progress," as made evident in mere popu- 
lation, will not ultimately mean five thousand small inef- 
fectual workmen where two thousand are now; two 
factories instead of one; fourteen days at Blackpool in 
place of eight, the eight-hour day, elevation of wages all 
round, and "in terms of the soul . . . two football 
contests where only one existed"? 



II 

So far, somber questions like these hardly apply to 
American life; or if they do America does not choose to 
consider them. Increase of population is one of the car- 
dinal articles of national optimistic faith, regardless of 
the other questions whether it is wisely organized, is 
contented, or is growing in racial worth. America as- 
sumes that these things follow naturally for the Ameri- 
can. Behind the rejection of severe measures restricting 
immigration, there is the feeling that to grow populous 
is to grow strong. The problems of population, as Europe 
faces them, seem a long way off. Meanwhile, other prob- 
lems immediate and pressing may be met by opening 
the doors wide enough to let in a million souls a year. 

With this fundamental hope lodged in the heart of 
American life, how does America feel towards the specific 
phenomena of population? 



i 



The Estimate of Population 93 

If we start first with the home, we shall find a paradox- 
ical attitude. The American child is not always wel- 
comed, but it is loved after its appearance, and often 
becomes a tyrannical cult that makes it later into an enfant 
terrible. For the American parent is too easy-going and 
optimistic to take the trouble, or believe in the need, of 
discipline. No rigorous teachers seize American youth. 
But Americans do not desire large families. The birth-rate 
in one section of New York is believed to be the lowest 
in the world. This is the quarter inhabited by rich people; 
but their ideals determine those of the classes nearest 
to them, and the moderately well off do not have large 
families. A family of four is large. 

This is not altogether, as some self-appointed censors 
allege, because the parents desire a life of ease and friv- 
olity. In some cases this is doubtless true, but for the 
most, the restriction of the family is due to the feeling 
that the parents are unable to give many children the 
"start in life," in education and bringing up, commen- 
surate with their own position. That favorite scapegoat, 
"the high cost of living," really affects life at its heart. 
There are some national observers whose conception is 
purely statistical, even in the matter of family life, be- 
cause numbers minister to the glory of the state; but wiser 
heads see that in the coming time the weight of national 
importance is likely to be shifted somewhat in favor of 
quality. Mr, Roosevelt has uttered much nonsense on 
the subject, and he deserves the severe reprimand that 
his conception of the nation is that of a "rabbit-warren." 
No amount of preaching will enlarge the native family; 
for the laws of human society are at work here as else- 
where, and the stationary population, formerly worked 
out by theoretic economists, is becoming the ideal and 
fact in large areas of American life. The ordinary bounds 



94 The Temper of the American People 

of subsistence do not prevent increase; but the ideal 
bounds of nurture, dignity, and competence are all the 
more imperative. Man does not live by bread alone. 

While the meddling sociologists of State legislatures 
are attempting ridiculous legislation against bachelors, 
and in favor of subsidies for child-bearing, only likely to 
be called for by precisely the most undesirable classes, 
the steady pressure of life keeps down the promise of large 
increase of the native stock. In the regions most aware 
of ethics a large family is often deemed a drawback. A 
minister who has several children is thought to be less 
able to give himself entirely to the church; and a large 
family makes a powerful appeal for lenient or generous 
treatment if he proves incapable, and so works against 
the best interests of the church. In middle-class life 
the cost of rent in a decent locality is so disproportionate 
that young people cannot marry as early as in former 
times. There are the city slums, where foreign stock 
has a higher birth-rate; and there are the agricultural 
regions which grow increasingly foreign; but the high 
birth-rate means lack of most things, for the native, that 
make life worth living. 

Thus the pride of population in America is not pride 
of a native stock, but of a great mass of economic units, 
capable under direction of making the country rich and 
powerful. 

ni 

As we have seen, immigration is an immense factor in 
the population. This has always been a source of excep- 
tional growth, and has contributed to the national life 
millions of adventurous spirits from the most diverse 
sources. In the last decade six and a quarter millions 
have been admitted to America; and an old State like 



The Estimate of Population 95 

Massachusetts has settled over half a million in the same 
time. New England still grows newer, with these streams 
of strange peoples flooding over it. 

The early exuberance and geniality of welcome to the 
immigrant have passed away; for the foreigner has come 
in large enough numbers to afford specific problems of 
social digestion; and he has brought some things that 
America could have done without. It is a fond dream of 
the benevolent that Italians may contribute something 
to the appreciation of art; but when Sicilians carry on 
their feuds and strike down American policemen; or when 
the sweepings of Italian cities waylay and murder their 
employers; or when Irishmen govern municipalities by 
strictly personal systems of politics, there are reasons for 
hesitation. Still more does America distrust the mysteri- 
ous Orient, and particularly nations that have changed 
their character in a generation, as Japan. Then, too, 
many of the immigrants have no concept of "nation," as 
Russian Jews, or Turks. How are these to mix with 
the present stock? How imbibe the national ideas? 
The "deep unsignifying life of the New Englander" is 
bound to halt its thinking before these other lives also 
unsignifying, — and perhaps not deep. 

Notwithstanding all, however, the American sentiment 
towards the immigrant is still one of fair play and the 
open door. The restrictions sometimes urged upon immi- 
gration find no general response. On the other hand, 
men like the former president of Harvard University are 
averse to academic restrictions, and Mr. Roosevelt ap- 
plauds stretching out the helping hand "to the men and 
women who come here to this country to become citizens 
and the parents of citizens." The government intends 
to be helpful at the receiving ports. If cases of hardship 
arise, they are not intentional, but are largely due to the 



96 The Temper of the American People 

immensity of the task of directing so many pathetic yet 
hopeful strangers. Possibly some of this fairness of the 
American is due to the troubled memories of his own 
ancestral ventures. A few Americans made the venture 
in the Mayflower, but more came in later and less lovely 
vessels. There is something in the American's memory, 
hardly conscious, yet determining his temper, that re- 
spects the heroes who leave behind the joys of a familiar 
life, for fierce economic struggles tempered by freedom. 
Americans remember the rock whence they were hewn. 
If they look up their ancestral history, which they do in 
large numbers, they find some progenitor who "came 
over"; and they may even pride themselves on the per- 
sonal traits that indicate this ancestral origin. 

While the more recent invasions of the most distant and 
unknown people gave anxiety on their first coming, there 
is now a tendency to try to be fair to them, to understand 
them on the part of a few by visiting them at their native 
homes, with the discovery that classes once deemed less 
desirable have some solid backgrounds, and may contrib- 
ute much to the national life. Within a decade there has 
been a marked modification of the hesitant feeling towards 
races once looked upon with doubt. They are now under- 
stood to be members of historic races, with their own 
systems of ethics and codes of honor, with human hearts 
like the rest of us. Extreme cases prove not so extreme 
after investigation. A vertebrate Turk is better than an 
invertebrate Saxon: for a good authority says: "Turkey 
too has ... a code of morals which produces so high a 
standard of right conduct in private life that very little 
in the way of moral lessons will have to be learned by the 
Ottomans from Western civilization." 

The attitude of theoretic complaisance towards the 
immigrant, on the part of the less thoughtful classes, 



The Estimate of Population 97 

though the attending problems are so grave, has been 
paralleled in the intellectual and philanthropic regions 
of the national life. The immigrant is now a cherished 
ward of philanthropy and religion. Much is done for 
him, and more is to be done. In the documents of some 
reformatory societies his heroism and worth are set forth. 
For the instructed people who read history, romance 
begins to gather about him. He may be persuaded to 
write his own life as a contribution to national experience. 
And when he attains scholarship himself, he will doubt- 
less find encouraging illustrations in other histories of 
the value of an imported blood in a national life. He may 
remind the obtuse who are cold to his ambitions, that 
immigrant Flemings began the English supremacy in 
textiles, and in the smelting of South Wales; Dutch 
drained the Fens; and Frenchmen first made English 
watches in London. If he should travel further, besides 
these industrials, he might discover true soldiers of the 
spirit, and souls of the noblest order, who were immi- 
grants, from the Father of the Faithful down. 



IV 

There is one region of national life, however, where 
the American hope is inadequate, and where the increase 
of population is a source of growing seriousness if not 
alarm. Among the colored population growth becomes a 
menace. Those who face it by propinquity estimate it 
variously, both as a fact, and as a problem. There are 
some who doubt if the colored population grows as fast as 
formerly, or that it will ever be a menace to white domi- 
nation; others see in it the cloud on the horizon filled 
with indescribable terror. Those who live in the North, 
apart from its daily pressure, heirs of a generous tradition 



98 The Temper of the American People 

in the negro's favor, slowly begin to feel that here indeed 
is the one great perplexity in the national life, likely to 
become insistent at no remote time. 

The negroes are generally thought of as a solid race; 
but in them there is a double diversity. On the one 
hand, they are not pure-blooded as respects themselves. 
The old concept of pure blood distinguishing the aristo- 
cratic peoples of history is plainly false. Few nations 
were pure-blooded, — Rome as little as any; and few are 
today. And there is as much difference, or even more, 
in the stocks the negroes are derived from as the original 
differences in the European stocks; for they range in 
origin from pigmies to Zulus. This mixing of race, how- 
ever, has not brought out a dominant temper, as in the 
case of Europe, consequently there is no history, and no 
racial pride behind them. When they look backward, 
as a few of them do, there is only a guess possible, for there 
are no records, no monuments, only a conglomerate of 
tradition that has grown so confused that it is useless. 
This is an immense drawback. The principal of an In- 
dian school, who had also known something of negroes, 
affirms that the Indian's pride of race is a civilizing 
asset of the greatest importance, and gives him an immense 
advantage over the negro. As Florio, the Italian, in 
Gissing's "Crown of Life" cries: "One is not proud of 
former riches when one has become a beggar. It is you, 
the English, who can be proud of the past, because you 
can be proud of the present." The situation of the negro, 
in all his known history, is not one to be proud of; and the 
known to the unknown is as one year to a millennium. 

Besides this obscure and confused ancestry, the negro 
has suffered from the admixture of white blood. The 
race itself, in large numbers, tells a story of shame. The 
North has pointed to the South as a sinner, and no doubt 



The Estimate of Population 99 

the South sinned ; but the Northern soldier in Reconstruc- 
tion times, strolHng about with negro wenches on each 
arm, and rollicking in dark groves with dusky mistresses, 
dare not take up a stone to cast at his ancient enemy. 
This sad story is world-wide. It has chapters in Africa 
and in India, — wherever there is a superior and an infe- 
rior people; but the chapter is more lengthy in America 
than elsewhere, with more startling illustrations and more 
threatening results. For the mixture of widely diverse 
bloods has led to irreconcilable passions in the mulatto 
population, — extremities of race and temper that appear 
in the more criminal propensities of this portion of the 
colored population, and the greater tendency to disease. 
As Bagehot well observed of the union of the Englishman 
and the Hindoo, the result is, "not only between races, 
but between moralities." 

In America, historically, — and this is the only place 
where the negro has a recorded history, — he was merely 
property until the War. One of the great blots on the 
terms of peace at the Revolution was the virtual recogni- 
tion of slavery. In the North slavery wore itself out 
through economic causes, and a growth in humane sen- 
timents. In the South it remained through economic 
causes, supported by humane sentiments. Mrs. Stowe's 
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" was an extreme case adduced at 
an extreme moment. There were good masters, the 
majority, or slavery could not have lasted as long as it 
did; there were bad ones, the minority, who made the sys- 
tem impossible. No man is good enough to be given sole 
control of another man: slavery hurts the owner as much 
as the owned. But there were ameliorations, sentimental 
feelings, tears of slaves for masters, of masters for slaves 
when in trouble, and the permanent verdict as to the 
general situation was offered by the faithfulness of the 



100 The Temper of the American People 

slaves to the master's wives and children, while their 
owners were away at the war. Relations of a permanent 
nature were established that do honor to both races. 
Here is a recollection of a sensitive spirit concerning the 
matter: "There are three other black faces," wrote Na- 
thaniel Shaler, "which were printed on my memory 
before I find that of my mother. It is probably on this 
account that the African face has always been dear to 
me. It still seems, as it surely is, the more normal 
human face, that of our own kind appearing in a way 
exceptional." 

In the Reconstruction period disastrous blunders were 
made. Negroes economically unfit were cast on the world 
to get a living as best they could. They had to starve 
or steal, or worse. Only by degrees could their former 
masters hire them, because they too were economically 
unready for the new order, and, moreover, had been de- 
spoiled of all they had. The negroes were morally unfit 
as well. Children left to rule the affairs of men will surely 
go astray, and these children went astray. They were 
still more politically unfit, for they had no experience of 
politics, whereas they had rudimentary morals and more 
than rudimentary industrial abilities. Yet the crowning 
blunder of giving them the ballot was made, and the one 
thing they were least fit for was the one thing they were 
allowed most freely of all. The theory that the exercise 
of political rights is educational is doubtful logic; and it 
is doubtful morals when those rights can only be exercised 
at the expense of a superior civilization. And this is 
what happened. 

The present situation of the negro daily grows more 
difficult. His future is not promising even in the North. 
Many of those whose color permits, "go over to white," 
in new places of residence in the Northern states; but those 



The Estimate of Population 101 

who cannot, remain integrated in their race, to face stolid 
opposition from white labor, and an increasing difficulty 
of securing justice when oppressed. A Massachusetts 
judge recently said that it was getting harder all the time 
for negroes to gain justice in Boston; and a great jurist 
resident in the South declares that it is harder for them to 
get justice than in the times of slavery. There is a 
pathetic note of hopelessness in many discussions of 
social life by negroes, for the several participants recite 
acknowledged wrongs, and demand stronger Federal 
power to prevent them. 

Both parties to the ancient quarrel doubtless see truths, 
but overstatement prevents their acceptance. Professor 
DuBois writes of negro advancement, — of negro property 
now worth three hundred millions, or six hundred millions 
if one reckons low assessment and recent rise in value; 
and this in the fade of obstructions in the way of thrift, 
such as no accessible savings-banks, municipal inequality 
of taxes, wages 25 to 50 per cent less than white, mob 
violence, and legal violence by the use of technicalities. 
On the other hand, Georgia had 672,000,000 of property 
before the War and only 160,000,000 after; and when 
nearly fifty years had elapsed, it still fell short of the 
earlier figures by 30,000,000 dollars. Hence the entire 
negro wealth is only equal to the wealth of one state before 
the War. It is the growing conviction of many observers 
that the negro has fallen back since slavery, when he was 
in good physical condition and a good laborer. He is 
neither now; nor is he as happy; he is having to pay a 
price for his freedom. And the white man is a necessary 
partner of his hazards. 

One awful hazard the negro increasingly faces, — that 
of the summary execution of lynch law upon him. 
Formerly, lynching was thought to be a localized crime, 



102 The Temper of the American People 

prevalent only in the South, where blood was hotter than 
in the North, and memories more bitter. This is no 
longer the case^ Lynching is a crime of population, — 
that is, of contiguity and economic pressure. Wherever 
negroes are numerous it is likely to occur. It is occurring 
in the North in even more terrible forms than in the 
South. If a Sumter, South Carolina, jury frees a white 
man who killed a negro in the dark; under the sanctions of 
the "unwritten law," the lynchers of Coatesville are freed 
"with cheers" of the attending crowd, as the Penn- 
sylvania jury announces its verdict. In New York City 
police officers lately shot without the slightest excuse 
some innocent negroes; and in Durant, Oklahoma, a man 
was first lynched, then identified after he was dead, and 
the lynchers had themselves photographed standing about 
the mutilated body of their victim. 



V 

The feelings we have considered apply only to the 
absolute increase of population; we must now briefly 
consider those aroused by relative changes, as the abso- 
lute increase affects one part of the national life or another. 

The first unit we turn to is the country town. The 
town is now very often merely the breeding place for the 
life of the larger communities. There are many town- 
ships almost deserted by the generous life of youth. The 
outer structure, and the organization of communal life, 
remain, but the persons most competent to carry them on 
grow fewer. If the town happens to grow, it hopes to be 
a city soon, and prosperity comes in the enlargement of its 
industries and the increase in value of the real estate. To 
avoid a less encouraging future, towns offer " inducements " 
to manufacturers to bring their industries to them. But 



The Estimate of Population 103 

often the story runs the other way. Through lack of 
natural advantages, distance from railroads, or deficiency 
in initiative, nothing comes, and what little trade there 
is tends to vanish before the better organized industries 
in larger places. Real estate goes down in value, social 
life is stagnant, and the older inhabitants lament the 
departure of youth and the ensuing marks of decrepitude. 
When the "stationary state" comes it does not appear so 
pleasant in reality as on paper. 

In the city the emotion of population grows articulate. 
The city scans its census, predicts the next total, compares 
it with other cities, shouts out its triumphant march 
towards metropolitan numbers. If it cannot exhibit 
large totals it fails in commercial councils. To gain them 
it links in neighboring boroughs so as to equal the popu- 
lation of some rival city; though the boroughs, in acqui- 
escing, often sell their birthright for a mess of pottage, — 
or a plain mess without the pottage. One city I know had 
great difficulty in procuring the attendance of an inter- 
national conference, because it strictly stated its legiti- 
mate numbers, while its rivals reckoned in the outlying 
suburbs. If this one had done so it would have been 
considerably larger than its nearest competitor. If you 
ask an American the population of his city, he always 
gives you the last census and the estimated increase since. 
He is proud of growth as growth; he is morally ashamed 
of diminution. 

The American construes the nation in the same way. 
For many people, America is the ninety millions who 
constitute it; and for all, the background of immense 
numbers affects the imagination when dealing with par- 
ticular facts. The American has laid hold of the aesthetic 
quality in mere multitude, as when the philosopher con- 
siders the Milky Way. Though there may be great 



104 The Temper of the American People 

numbers in the population who are but ordinary men, 
no one can think of ninety miUions without the sense of 
subhmity being stirred. There is the renaissance of 
wonder at the least. How did they all come to be? How 
do they exist? What do they mean? This immensity 
of the national problem doubtless makes something of 
its attractiveness, for it has the contagion of infinity upon 
it. To be part of such a mighty whole adds something 
to the stature of the mere individual citizen, just as 
the shuffling rustic unconsciously straightens up when 
he walks the crowded streets on his annual visit to 
town. 

Moreover, among so many something w^ill surely turn 
up; these are to be fed and clothed, educated, governed. 
Any thoughtful man feels the possibilities here that keep 
him keen and alert. A nation growing at so great a pace 
must soon be "at the head of all creation"; not to over- 
ride others, but to make American ideas prevail, to 
organize society on a wider democratic basis, to exploit 
neglected areas of life, to stir up indolent peoples to 
activity, to . . . 

Thus, in moments of cessation from the tasks of life, 
the American generously dreams. And his sentiments of 
population color attractively the facts of the national 
life, until they wave before his half-closed eyes as 
realities and idealities indivisibly joined. The observer has 
kindly thoughts of him because he dreams so generously: 
he will think still more of him when he awakens out of his 
statistical slumber. 

VI 

The powers of American population balance, in a 
measure, the problems that flow from these great 
numbers. 



The Estimate of Population 105 

One of these powers is that of assimilation. In a sense, 
one in every ninety of the population, per annum, does not 
seem a great demand on national assimilation; for this is 
the ratio of immigration into the national life. But large 
deductions must be made from the ninety millions of 
natives, since many of these are but recent arrivals as yet 
unassimilated, and still more are imperfectly digested into 
the national organization. The difficulty is accentuated 
as the foreign peoples hold closely together, because of 
language, in some cases making an impenetrable country, 
with its own traditions of love and hate, its own scheme 
of virtue and vice, its peculiar scale of economics, and its 
persistent suspicion of the stranger. There are, conse- 
quently, localities where ideal Americanism seems unable 
to penetrate; and there are others where the floods of 
immigration have noticeably changed the hue and reso- 
lution of the native stock. These dangers are not thrust 
on America, they are invited, and nowhere does the power 
of American life seem more wonderful than in this process 
of assimilation. We shall see in a later chapter how this 
is brought about; at the present we merely note the 
fact that after Gargantuan tasks America still survives. 
America yet remains American. 

A further and self-evident power of American population 
is economic. Americans are not slow to see this as a 
source of strength. They spend ten millions on the 
census, which is better taken than elsewhere, and indicates 
the estimate of population in economic respects more than 
others. America feels that it needs men to develop the 
resources of the country, and to work into the more rigidly 
organized industries. "Where should we be," said a 
civil engineer, when dealing with the question, "if it 
were not for these men who come to us? We need their 
labor; and on the flood of their economic strength we 



lOG The Temper of the Amerieati People 

professional and commercial classes are carried to the 
lucrative places. Keep them out and oiu- sons will have to 
get into the ditch. Somebody has to do this work." 
Here one gets a reasoned statement of the hopefulness of 
the American, as to the place and worth of even the least 
worthy members of the national population, reckoned from 
the old social standards. In the national practice it issues 
in the exploitation of nature by the immigrant; and the 
exploitation of nature and the immigrant by the classes 
above. 

Perhaps by the very pressure of the population America 
develops a remarkable aptitude for rapid organization. 
In times of need or of excitement the American is not 
entirely a mob; the crowd in its wildest moments has lucid 
intervals. It may appear to be as frantic as a lynching, 
or as silly as a convention, but in the most hysterical 
moments there are vestiges of method. Swift organiza- 
tion is one of the fortunate tilings in a rough and un- 
manageable state where there are no long-settled 
habits, and among people whose indi\'iduality is rooted 
in greatly diUering backgrounds. This rough and 
ready settlement of life for immediate purposes often 
adopts some of the older forms with the newer in 
an unbelievable conj miction, as when a missionary 
preached liis first sermon in a Wyoming town, with 
his hand in his pocket on a pistol, and his vnfe played 
the organ with a similar weapon "^-itliiii reach. This 
a new interpretation of the adaptability of the gospel 
in its details! But the problem of American organiz- 
ation is so great that to have handled it at all is to make 
progress. 

More effective, because more implicit in the national 
mind, is another feeling centering on tliis prime fact of 
population, namely, the expectation that in the large 



The Estimate of Population 107 

mass of the population, there may be suddenly disclosed 
some social virtue that will cure the social ills. When 
facing the difficulties that sprinj^ up in the national life, 
the American falls back on his "great country," and tliis 
in turn often means the great population out of which, 
by some inexplicable magic, salvation is to be wrought. 
It is incredible to him that, among so many men, some 
one will not discover a way of formulating a social order 
better than any hitherto kno\m. Surely in the shifting 
of so many pohtical units, some happy hazard will develop 
the conclusive state. In the permutations of human 
society on the vast scale that he knows in his own land, he 
feels that somewhere, somehow, a mode of activity will 
develop that he may apply to the whole of politics. If 
one city, for example, is oppressed by a political oligarchy, 
and humiliated by a ridiculous mayor, he rests in the as- 
surance tliat somewhere else the problems of citizenship 
are being worked out to finer issues, and when the time is 
ripe, he too, will "clean up" his political house, on tlie 
method, and by the inspiration developed elsewhere. 
And so, with all the declension from the early ideals 
of her national life, America hopes all things, endures 
all things, for she has the raw materials of politics at her 
doors in greater mass than any other nation. She has 
men. 

One other power, due to population, now becoming 
more evident in America, is the sense of freedom from inter- 
national fear. Even though America walks among neigh- 
bors that she once avoided, she does not walk as those 
neighbors move among themselves. She knows, and they 
know, that her resources and population make her the 
arbiter of the political destinies of the world, in a sense 
that no other country can possibly be. Some of her 
citizens exhibit this sense in a senseless fashion, from the 



108 The Temper of the American People 

vociferous headliner who would "lick all creation," to 
the man who continually puts his trust in "the big stick." 
But there are great numbers of thoughtful people who feel 
that America is in a peculiarly strong position, because of 
resources in wealth and men, and that she has no need to 
shriek out her belief in this matter. The belief is there, 
and it gives comfort in sudden storms, and it permits 
unanxious attention to one's own proper business as well. 



VII 

There are some deductions to be made, however, from 
this generous optimism of the American people, as they 
consider the population of the country. 

The antagonisms of race, often breaking out, afford an 
illustration of some ugly remainders in the national life. 
The more thoughtful American deplores these antago- 
nistic feelings among the various stocks that come to his 
shores. Yet he is himself no small offender against 
universal tolerance. 

Almost unwittingly, the American, by his attitude and 
doctrine, represents a race issue himself. He is proud of 
his country and his race. He rejoices in his history as 
the most self-evidently righteous in the world. But his 
pride is too often tainted with contempt for other people 
who have not been the elect of historical providence. 
By many, the immigrant is treated with contempt, and 
the alien feels this enough to take to protective mimicry 
in dress and speech to escape contumely. Americans have 
not taken pains enough to break up the race solidarity of 
immigrants, by an individual contact with them on the 
basis of a common humanity. No one who has not passed 
through the icy region that every struggling alien has to 
traverse, can imagine the social evasion of some members of 



The Estimate of Population 109 

the older communities, where "old families" of two gen- 
erations dictate the social life of the place. The newcomer 
is accepted as an economic factor; but his human claims 
are coldly dismissed. 

It is this implication of superiority that leads to the 
worst aspects of the race question, found in the attitude 
towards the negro. In the North the negro has a waning 
prescriptive right, due to the old battles fought on his 
behalf, whose meanings linger in the mind today; but 
the North takes on an aristocratic contempt for anything 
feebler or more inefficient than itself. A recent philosopher 
affirms that race enmities are due to illusion, and that the 
illusion of superiority of race is the greatest. In the South 
the solidarity of the negro is more obstructive than ever, 
for he is pushed back upon himself by the political and 
social determination of the whites, and so comes less inti- 
mately into contact with the higher civilization than in 
the days of slavery. While Americans have a genius for 
organization and while they manage the problems of mass 
fairly well, they are often betrayed into thinking that all 
problems unusually large can be solved by mass treat- 
ment. In reality, the problems of mass, when they con- 
cern human life are, at bottom, matters of individuality. 
The pressing need of the highly individualized American 
today is to be individual in his solutions of the problems of 
population, personal in his contacts with these differing 
races, forgetful of his superiority save as a means of 
personal strength to be rendered for the relief of man's 
estate. 

Connected with this sense of superiority, is the ugly 
shadow of hysteria. It is possible for men to be drunk 
with power when they have no prophet near the throne 
to restrain them. Sovereigns, whether individuals, or a 
whole people, seldom hear serious criticism of themselves. 



110 The Temper of the American People 

Then, too, city life, separated from the tranquiUities of 
nature, or the self-contained heroisms due to wrestles 
with cosmic forces, tends to mass-feelings unresolvable 
into reason. Further, the uniformity of society lends 
itself to passionate waves of feeling, that swiftly permeate 
the whole body. And politics reenforces the general 
temper as it suddenly elevates rhetoricians into saviors, 
or willingly acquiesces in the hardest tasks set it by active 
and interested political deities. America is hysterical, 
both in good things and bad. Sometimes the feelings are 
applied to noble ends and great good ensues; but when 
the same over-emphasis happens to get misplaced, the 
good is more than offset, for it simply becomes an ortho- 
dox preliminary to anarchy. 

Apart, however, and somewhat distant, from these 
sinister notes in the national life, there are two limita- 
tions in the American population, of the broadest general 
order, that moderate the power and splendor of the 
mass. 

One is the depressing uniformity of life, due to the me- 
chanical organization of the units. Only in industrialism, 
and only there in the topmost places, does the individual 
fully express himself. In social and political life the 
American expresses himself under well-worn rubrics. In 
the most favorable examples, one cannot find the indi- 
viduality that is apparent in an English or Scotch country 
town, as illustrated, for example, in John Watson's stories, 
or Mr. Barrie's, or in the strange and fascinating "Mad 
Shepherds" of Professor Jacks, or the weird poems which 
another professor entitles "A Shropshire Lad." Few in 
America try to break through the mass feelings. Every 
one is trying to catch the note. The culture of America 
is too conscious, too striving, too pedantic, too philan- 
thropic. It would not dare the dissidence of the English- 



The Estimate of Population 111 

man who cried: "I am a member of the National Liberal 
Club, a teetotaler, and a passive resister. I have lately 
married my deceased wife's sister, and none of my children 
has been vaccinated." The individuality of the American 
is more often a defensive individuality; it hardly ever 
takes its own line. It is admirable within limits; but it 
has limits. 

These limits end in the other defect of the repression 
of happiness. For a country that makes "the pursuit 
of happiness" one of its political programs, America has 
stupendously failed. The "weary Titan," England, has 
succeeded better than America. There, the higher ranks 
of life have given themselves specifically to finding 
happiness, and on the whole have not missed it as much 
as the higher ranks in America, because they have been 
educated for it by duties and custom, and the traditions 
of a liberal life, and by participation in the government 
of the country. The American of similar standing 
takes either to pleasure undisturbed by thought, or to 
thought unalloyed with pleasure. The middle-class 
Englishman finds a reenforcement of life in the feelings 
of those about him, and in participation in the life of 
his peers: he has a history, class ideals, objects of 
struggle in the social and political world. He finds 
scope for all his energies. The American finds more 
scope for his industrial energies than the Englishman, 
but less for his social powers. He cannot feel at one 
with his kind, for there is no one kind. His neigh- 
bor may be an apparent American, but his backgrounds 
are different. Only in politics do men get together 
measurably, and then only for the moment. Especially 
pitiable is the situation of the respectable working orders 
in American life. They do not achieve a social group. 
The Englishman with his institutes, parks, concerts, has 



112 The Temper of the American People 

found some of the secrets of happiness. The German has 
found perhaps still more. The Frenchman has found 
most of all. But the American, when he has organized 
his society, suffers from ennui. He has not organized 
himself. 



CHAPTER VI 

METROPOLITAN AND SUBURBAN EMOTIONS 



THE city, as the supreme type of organized popula- 
tion, has always been a prepotent factor in national 
life. The capitals of the race have been great imaginative 
forces. Young Athenians, young Romans, young Eng- 
lishmen, have gone up to their respective capitals to gain 
a fortune, or to sit at the feet of wisdom to be prepared 
for destiny. 

But the capital today has forced itself on men's imagina- 
tion in a new way. It is no longer wholly a pride and a 
glory; it is something of an oppression, if not a tyranny. 
For the population has gathered there in such numbers, 
that old rules of society are inadequate for its needs; 
and too often low-browed shame dares to parade its streets 
as a conqueror. 

Our own day has seen the emergence of many capitals, 
where, in former times, one served; and these plural capi- 
tals are communities with their own history, pride, and 
purpose. Indeed, there has been a marked change from 
the capital to the metropolis as the outstanding illustra- 
tion of population. No longer does one city control the 
destinies of a nation. London is not England, Paris is 
not France, as in former days. And this subordination of 
chief cities in relation to the national life, has come about 
through the rise of provincial capitals, where a particular 
locality has focused all its energies and funded its wealth. 



114 The Temper of the American People 

The growth of this provincial capitaHzation has been 
remarkable in Europe. Lord Morley cites Mr. Gladstone 
as remembering Liverpool when the population was only 
one hundred thousand; and quotes him as saying: — "I 
have seen wild roses growing upon the very ground that 
is now the center of Bootle." A hundred years ago, in 
all Europe there were not twenty cities with over one hun- 
dred thousand population, and not one in America: now 
there are two hundred cities of this class on the two con- 
tinents. In 1800 no city in the world was known to have 
over a million inhabitants; now there are nine in Europe 
and America, and four in Asia. 

This immense expansion of European cities has been the 
more remarkable, because it has usually been a super- 
vening growth, due to an industrial or commercial develop- 
ment that came upon some ancient foundation of civic 
life. Sometimes it has been a legitimate, but long deferred, 
enlargement of early commercial tendencies. Manchester, 
for example, had a woolen trade before the Romans came 
to Britain. In these cases, the commercial or industrial 
development has had to overcome the traditions of history 
and society, the indolent enchantments of romance, and, 
almost always, structural limitations, as the walls of a 
city, built for defence, hemmed in the population and pre- 
vented convenient growth. Yet many of these cities 
have grown faster than cities in America. Berlin has 
beaten New York; Hamburg, Boston; Leipsic, St. Louis; 
and Dtisseldorf, St. Paul. Rome has had both kinds of 
history; for in her prime she had a population of a million, 
wliich had declined in 1860 to 184,000; but since 1860 she 
has crept up to 450,000. 

In the bare fact of growth, therefore, the American 
city does not differ materially from the European city. 
Nor does it differ in the matter of one great contributory 



Metropolitan and Suburban Emotions 115 

factor of this growth. I refer to the steady supply of 
agricultural workers that streams into the commercial 
towns. In London, one third of the population is immi- 
grant from other districts; and so great has been the in- 
draught, that ten of the rural counties of England and 
Wales have less population than sixty years ago. The 
country thus becomes the place where the aged remain, 
or go to die. The city is the arena of the middle-aged, 
the active, the healthy, and the youthful. In France 
the same movement is going on. Thus cities increase 
at the expense, in part, of country districts. And the 
waste of life is enormous. In England local city families 
do not last many generations; the growth has to depend 
measurably on immigration. The same is true of the 
American city. Its offices, business, industries are carried 
on largely by those who have gone thither from other 
places, and often enough from the country. One con- 
tinually catches the rural accent in unexpected places in 
city life in America. 

In two respects, however, there is a great difference in 
the growth of an American city from the growth of a 
city in Europe. One is, that there are few or no obstruc- 
tions in the way of extension. There are no deposits 
from an age that was not industrial. All growth has 
taken place in the period of industrialism. There are 
few sentiments to debar activities, or romantic imagina- 
tions to keep back energetic philistinism from wreaking 
its utmost. There are only the broad acres of the prairie, 
scrubby woodland, the outlying reaches of festering 
suburbs, or the invitation of an uncultivated soil to 
exploit it. 

The other difference is in the actual population, which 
is much more foreign in America than in any European 
city, and more diverse in its origins as well. And this 



116 The Temper of the American People 

» 
makes a consequent difference in organization, approach, 
and feeling. 

II 

The American city has contributed much to the sum of 
the national wealth, and is, moreover, a striking monu- 
ment of it, besides being the expositor of many American 
characteristics. The visitor to the greatest centers is 
bound to acknowledge the immense organization of life, 
the wonderful industry of the inhabitants, and the state 
and glory of the finer side of city life. But this wealth 
is being consumed on an increasing scale of extravagance, 
that grows so obviously, that after one or two years' 
absence the visitor discerns definite marks indicating the 
steady rise of luxury. The onlooker can see in New York, 
on Fifth Avenue, a tide of riches hardly equaled in the 
world. At midnight, on Broadway, when the theaters 
close, he can still think it day, and in the glare of extrava- 
gant illumination he sees pleasure at the helm, if not 
youth at the prow. No city in the world has so many 
places of amusement; in no city does the tide of life run 
so strongly, endlessly, or intemperately, in respect to 
activity and pleasure. Life plays for high stakes and 
winning or losing it pays the price. 

Part of the price is always at hand in the crowded, sordid 
regions, where the goods are made that are vended in the 
markets of fashion. This is not a side of the city's life that 
looks hopefully to the dawn. Here one gets the "mislaid 
side of things" huddled together in a confusion that of 
itself is a species of misery. Romance is here, but only 
intermittently, for the heart will break out on occasion; 
crime is here; inefficiency is here, due to idleness or 
ignorance or misfortune; and for the majority, the daily 
round, the trivial task, and no escape into the joy of unex- 



Metropolitan and Suburban Emotions 117 

pectedness that the heart hungers for. Always too, there 
are grim reminders of the tragedy that waits on crowded 
workrooms, with no sufficient protection from fire, or the 
avaricious lusts of men. Here is the place where popula- 
tion grows by flooding increments; here too is the place 
where it is ravenously consumed. 

If this were all, the smoke of the city's torment would 
call for the speedy extinction of the city's existence. It 
is not all. There are in all American cities sunny resi- 
dential districts, with fine dwellings, gracious persons, 
and a type of feminine loveliness that cannot be matched 
anywhere in the world. In this region social instincts 
leap to the margin of any great enterprise and carry it to 
an easy success. There are quiet homes where the inmates 
hear the still sad music of humanity, and attempt as far 
as possible a concord in the huge confusion. There are 
philanthropic institutions so numerous that the charitable 
stand amazed. Money is given away so lavishly that the 
Arabian Nights seem just about to begin again. There 
are literary, artistic, and religious coteries and organiza- 
tions that have in them the promise of better things. 
There are workmen struggling upward and teachers 
reaching out to them, and many-sided ventures in friend- 
liness not limited by the old distinctions. 

Below these real capitals of the country, there are the 
theoretic ones where legislation for the state is the larger 
interest. Then come the more agricultural cities of the 
West where distribution is the chief business. Below 
these are the little cities, hardly populous enough to 
varrant the name, where education may be the main in- 
terest, because a college is there; or where, as in the South, 
a distinct social life is developed; in both cases places 
where retired life takes on more gracious aspects, though 
it tends to become immensely conservative, thus discoura- 



118 The Temper of the American People 

ging enterprise and so less vitally connected with the 
national life in its main currents. In all these cases the 
metropolis nearest at hand affects the life of the place, 
and the imitative faculties of men express themselves by 
duplicating metropolitan life as far as possible. 

And last, there is the manufacturing town, which repre- 
sents the other half of Rome. The metropolis exhibits 
the efflorescence of industry in flowers sometimes faded, 
sometimes glorious. The industrial town is where the 
roots are planted. Here one may find a Greek temple in 
the city square newly erected to the worship of mammon 
in the shape of a banking institution. With this there 
may be some few reasonably good stores, but there are 
many that vend only poorer things both in value and taste. 
On the higher ground about the city are a few streets 
that try to keep an air of distinction, but often fail because 
the old mansions arc grown shabby, or the new dwellings 
are too self-consciously new and prosperous. In other 
localities there may be a huddle of tenements, and streets 
glaring in summer, and black with mud in winter. Among 
the better oft' there is a semblance of society that follows 
the organized patterns of the metropolis, but weakly. 
Then there are the solid workmen, growing fewer, who own 
their homes and are setting their children in higher places, 
by self-sacrifice, as they give them an education beyond 
their own. And at the end there are the mass of the people 
who live from day to day, in work, or pleasure, or want, 
as the case may be. This mass is mainly undifferentiated, 
but there are occasional outcroppings of beauty and re- 
finement that startle the observer, in the persons of some 
of the young women, who seem instinctively to know how 
to dress, and how to carry themselves in public. There 
are also faces among the younger men that are much more 
regular in feature than one finds in England, and as 



Metropolitan and Suburban Emotions 119 

likely as not these may be men who some day will be 
found in far different regions of life. But on the whole 
there are not many of these variations: the life, like the 
surroundings, is a faded copy of something deemed to be 
higher. As the ruling passion in the business of these 
cities is said to be: "To make something just as good for 
less money," so on the side of the human product the 
attempt is to be thought as good as more favored persons, 
though at less cost of intellectual, social, or moral strain. 



Ill 

For the inhabitant of any metropolis in America, or 
even a dweller in the metropolitan region, if he does not 
think too seriously about life, the first emotion is that of 
pride in the size of his contiguous population. Most people 
who dwell in these areas announce the fact with a certain 
superiority. They delight in being a part of a great mass, 
where the tides of life run strongly. They are imagina- 
tively impressed by the funded interests of their metropolis 
though they really participate very little in them; and 
by the reputation of the commercial leaders who sit in 
hearing of a hundred streams of influence and power. 
They cry up the advantages of the city, its climate, 
liarbor, railroad connections, and, if no more, the hinter- 
land that gradually developing will surely make it a leader 
in its class. They point to its buildings, many stories 
high, where the modern devotions go on more intensely 
than the ancient worship of pagan gods. They remark 
their schools, libraries, and "the conveniences of life." 
They particularly call attention to the development of 
all these things as going on faster than in other cities, and 
notably faster than in their nearest competitor. When 
possible they indulge in rude pleasantries about their rivals. 



120 The Temper of the American People 

after the manner of the story told by Mr. Brownell, to 
the effect that a Southron, describing a dinner-party to 
some friends, said that the company consisted of "an 
elegant gentleman from Virginia, a gentleman from Ken- 
tucky, a man from Ohio, a fellow from New York, and a 
galoot from Boston." In similar fashion the metropolitan 
press is full of ironical references to other large cities, 
and these are generally written down as "slow" compared 
with the competence of one's own capital. 

At the same time the observer, and especially the ques- 
tioner, if he will take the trouble to go a little deeper, 
finds that these expressions are as ritual as the creed of 
many an ancient religion, and uttered as unthinkingly. 
It is the custom to say these things to the outsider and 
to stand up for the dignity of one's city, much as the 
college man cheers his athletic team to keep its cour- 
age up. But when pressed, the honest citizen will 
droop from his high spirits, and almost wearily admit 
defects. Along with the pride in the external devel- 
opment of the metropolis there is often a profound dis- 
gust with the political side of civic life. And here the very 
size of the city becomes a startling menace. The citizen 
feels his inability to realize the formula of Bentham 
"to count for one, and not more than one." He is de- 
pressed by the thought that ignorant or base men count 
for as much or more than himself. 

It is depression, quite as much as indolence, that keeps 
many of the more respectable voters away from the 
polls. City government has become so large a business, 
that a man needs to give much of his time to understand 
it. Those who have nothing to do willingly give their 
energies to manipulating the units. The good citizen 
cannot afford to give his time to the same extent, and so 
he gives up the struggle. He is well aware that he will 



Metropolitan and Suburban Emotions 121 

have to give time, when the day of wrath gets put on the 
civic calendar, but he is willing to await that day, when 
even he may become furious, and reform everything in 
sight. Meanwhile the persistent reformers, as well as 
the men who are furthest from reform, cry out to him to 
go to the polls, for the rogues are quite orthodox here; 
but the citizen has gone to the polls too often to be ignorant 
of the fact that it was only Hobson's choice that was offered 
to him, since no candidate truly represented him. Re- 
formers are now remembering — what the baser crowd 
always remembers — that the real place of power is in 
the ward committees and local councils; but to gain this 
power would take time, — more time than the busy citi- 
zen has to spare. It would often take something else, 
namely, the self-respect of the man who embarks on the 
sea of local politics. The citizen begins to feel that voting 
is not a " sovereign " attribute, but a merely vulgar by -pi ay 
of a game he cannot direct, and often that he cannot 
understand. It sounds patriotic to berate this temper, 
and to say that the "shame" of the cities is, at bottom, 
a shameful indifference of the voter. One should not 
think the voter indifferent; he is wearied, disgusted, 
politically confused, morally overstrained. 

Hence, the city dweller is apt to be hysterical in the 
face of sudden needs. The strain of his life, the endless 
noise — for which Americans seem to have a positive 
genius — the continuous demands on his consciousness, 
tend to exhaust him. He has lost the poise of an earlier 
and simpler day. He is afraid of some shadows needlessly, 
and brave unnecessarily in the face of others. His morals 
are often mass morals, and therefore unethical; his wicked- 
nesses are mass passions, and therefore inhuman. His 
appreciation of greatness is merely a happy chance; his 
acceptance of charlatans a thing to make ascetics laugh. 



122 The Temper of the American People 

All this is evident in the ebb and flow of his policies; 
when, as often happens, he reverses himself swiftly, and 
writes himself down as an ass in fair large pluralities. 
From the riot of extremes on the exchange, when a whisper 
becomes the portent of toppling fortunes, or another 
revelation of El Dorado, to the organization of a mob on 
mere suspicion, there are times far too frequent when 
the city mob swings with the unreason of a Roman 
populace. 

The city dweller is, further, provincial. The richer 
culture is collected in colleges in the impressiveness that 
belongs to mass, and one great problem of American life 
in the near future will be to bring that culture to the 
unlettered, directly and consciously. Beginnings are 
already being made. But the college graduate is so busy 
getting a start in life, that for some years at least, after 
graduation, he fails somewhat of his opportunities of leader- 
ship. The man of taste goes abroad for long visits, and 
so misses the chance of leavening the lump of commoner 
experience. The moderately well off are apt to migrate 
to the suburbs. Thus there is left a large proportion of 
provincials. The metropolitan moving to his material 
ends has no time for excursions into a larger world; for 
the pressure of his "interests" keeps him down to the 
beaten way. He does not know his own city, save in a 
pretty uniform direction, — the portion he daily traverses 
on his way to work or business. He reads a paper that 
pushes before him the silly doings of a fifth-rate politician 
of local notoriety, and ignores the weighty deliverance of 
the scholar, or the real political thinker. The newspapers 
persistently keep local matters to the front. A visitor of 
national reputation who makes an address receives scant 
notice, while the local speaker, who is probably a very 
ordinary man, is reported more fully. In some respects 



Metropolitan and Suburban Emotions 123 

this is necessary, but it is carried to so great an extreme 
that newspapers generally are esoteric reading, indeed, 
almost cryptograms, for the reader who does not belong to 
the locality. 

The city dweller, with all the marks of refinement that 
the better type possesses, compared with the rural popu- 
lation is not a man of wide interests. He lacks back- 
ground, and is often wearisomely thin. With unlimited 
opportunities of social contact, he is apt to seek very few, 
save those that belong to his own narrow walk in life. 
Apart from business or trade, — upon which he thinks very 
hard, — he lets the mad or rational world go its way, 
equally indifferent to both until they rise to spring-tides, 
when he may be swept off his feet. Ordinarily he would 
keep the middle way, "the practical mean," which has 
degenerated with him into the science of evading the 
largest issues of life. He continually demands that any 
presentation of things shall be interesting. The scholar, 
as such, finds it difficult to get a hearing in the general 
range of life, unless he is also an artist; but the rhetorical 
artist, whether a scholar or not, obtains an audience, and 
also pecuniary rewards. In the city, clergymen must not 
exact too much thinking, for their hearers too must be 
"interested," or, as one once put it, who belonged to the 
class, "amused." In order to stir the jaded interest of 
men weary with six days of fierce toil, everything must be 
heightened, and the heightening tends to become less a 
matter of significance, than of too emphatic expression. 
Carlyle long ago laughed at the conception of a civiliza- 
tion that moved along on the windy current of "tremen- 
dous cheers"; but the American city dweller has too often 
reached the place where this has sunk one degree lower 
into tremendous shouts. 

It is true there is yet a dwindling remnant who stand 



124 The Temper of the American People 

their ground, remembering the best traditions of the past, 
who seek in all possible ways to keep the glory of the city 
undimmed, and to forward its most ideal enterprises. 
These become trustees of public institutions, academic, 
artistic, philanthropic, and religious. Their names head 
the worthier city movements; they give generously in time 
and money and they lend their possessions freely. One 
of these said, when standing in a gallery where a number 
of Monet's owned by him were on exhibition: "I keep my 
pictures for my own pleasure, and that of my friends," — 
the friends in his case being the appreciative general 
public. 

Men like these are not so very numerous in the mass, 
and often their strong individuality prevents them from 
acting together with effective unanimity, and in general 
they are separated from the great body of citizens by wealth 
or the traditions of family. When, therefore, their action 
in the pursuit of their duties or their ideals runs counter 
to some interested persons, though the matter be one of 
pure art or pure knowledge, it is not difficult for the plebeian 
press to stir up so great a tumult that their rational plans 
are obstructed by the obstinate passions of the larger 
elements of the population. In some cities it is quite 
easy to stir up the municipal leaders against these men of 
light and leading, mainly because they are such. But 
even so, there are many citizens who, by virtue of doing 
something for the common good, see signs of a better day, 
as indeed they have a right to do. 

So much for the feelings of the city dweller himself. 
There remains to consider the feeling of the man beyond 
the city vortex, who lives where he sees the spectacle 
of its power and wealth. And this man is of two 
classes. 

There is the man who looks at the city life with longing. 



Metropolitan and Suburban Emotions 125 

He feels the isolation of his rural neighborhood. His 
worst instincts get a stimulus from the city; so do his best. 
His morning paper comes from the city whose characters 
and happenings he knows. In imagination he takes a 
part in the life it describes; perhaps ultimately he takes an 
actual part in it, and contributes one more to the metro- 
politan population. If this is not possible, whether he is 
theoretically a hedonist or not, he feels that yonder there 
are more instruments of pleasure than in his native valley, 
or on his monotonous plain, or in the little town 
where he knows everything too well. He will go 
to the city for his annual trip; he will find work or 
business there if he can; above all, he will give his 
children "advantages." If this is impossible he thinks 
himself defrauded because destiny keeps him out of the 
enchanted circle. 

The other type of man looks on the city with anxiety. 
Unimmersed in its pressing business, he stands far enough 
away to see it in juster proportions than his fellows who 
are themselves in the eddying currents of city life. He 
finds that the city touches him in tender spots, and makes 
new, or irritates old, wounds. He is in the hands of com- 
mission merchants and trusts. To many of this class, 
the "city fellows" are only gentlemen thieves. The 
countryman knows that his local railroad has been syndi- 
cated in a big system, and that he has often been squeezed 
by its city management. The goods he buys from the city 
do not wear as well as in former days. Altogether the 
city, though his market, takes too great a toll, and be- 
comes a menace if not a tyranny. The professional man 
feels more still these larger issues. He sympathizes with 
his neighbors in both their longing and resentments; but 
he knows also the delicacy of the organization of communal 
life on so large a scale. He knows that he is a part, — 



126 The Temper of the American People 

contributory of course, — of the city life, and that city 
life affects him in return. He pictures the educational and 
aesthetic aspects of city life and he gives them a due 
eminence, and the roaring tide of humanity draws from 
him the sigh of the philosopher or the verse of the poet. 
But at the end, he is bound to feel that nowhere in history 
were such large populations gathered together, that were 
led or driven by so incompetent leaders, whose flippancy 
was so criminal in the light of the opportunities of knowl- 
edge, — whose future becomes the dark problem of Ameri- 
can life. 

IV 

Close to the city, almost a part of it, looking on it with 
mixed feelings of pride and criticism, lies Suburbia, which 
yet awaits its historian and psychologist. It is a place 
of fair wide streets, long and umbrageous vistas, com- 
fortable if not beautiful houses, where the smoke and 
fever of city life are left behind. Sometimes the city looks 
piratically toward this unspoiled region, to be repelled 
by the united efforts of the residents of the suburb. The 
giant may at last creep up, but he will have to take all the 
intermediate defences first. Here is the place where 
the American home rules the policies of the community; 
the child is the real interpreter; the matron the new 
Amazon. Walk the streets at noon and you see crowds of 
ruddy children, and in the late hours of afternoon the 
women. But few men are to be seen. These return at 
night and depart on the morrow. The whole region is 
domestic; it is the idealized Puritan community, — for 
the Puritan discovered the meaning of home; and the 
suburbs keep that meaning in view. 

Suburbia has divided interests. It is aware of the mis- 
managed policies of the city adjacent. But all it tries to 



Metropolitan and Suburban Emotions 127 

do is to keep itself separate from the city, and to be un- 
spotted by its evil. Suburban politics are generally very 
good; city politics are generally very bad; and there is 
a thread of connection between the two. The city needs 
suburban morals; the suburban communities need to 
meet more fairly the metropolitan problems. The busi- 
ness man does not vote where he does his business, and 
where he lives and can vote there is not so much need 
of his moral force, because the evil-disposed are not as 
numerous as in the city. Thus Suburbia is a modern 
illustration of the old ascetic principle of separation from 
a naughty world. It is easier for the individual to do 
this. But some portions of communal life suffer, as they 
did in the Mediaeval Age, by reason of the method 
adopted. 

On the other hand. Suburbia has to depend measurably 
on the city for its higher life of art and amusement. The 
theaters are there, the orchestras, the lectures, reforms, 
and general coteries of elevation. What the suburbs can 
do of themselves is not much, and one is continually sur- 
prised at the amateurish performances that go on in the 
very shadow of acknowledged competence. Distance has 
some obstructive force here, for the outlying suburbs are 
not easily accessible to each other, and the city makes a 
better meeting place. But, even so, the city does not hold 
close relations with the suburbs in a social way, at least 
to influence them by frequent and actual contact on the 
part of the finest life. The suburbans left the city to 
bring up their children in a better place, and they do not 
return to the old neighborhood, because it is generally 
run down; and the still remaining nobler life of the city, 
in the more aristocratic quarters, was a life that most of 
them had never known, and one they are now even less 
likely to meet. 



128 The Temper of the American People 

The business of the suburbs all centers in the home. 
Founding homes, bringing up families, making a place of 
rest, — these ar6 the prime things. But there go with 
prime things secondary ones; and of the secondary inter- 
ests of the suburbs the greatest is education. Where the 
children are, there will necessarily be the schools. The 
schools are reasonably good, and compared with most 
other regions of the national life are of the first class. 
Some of them are as large as colleges, and they afford the 
opportunity of preparation for almost any collegiate career 
that the scholars may choose. 

Another suburban interest is morals and religion. As 
to morals, the suburban community is least contributory 
to the horrid details of the sensational press. The morals 
of an American suburb exceed in purity those of Europe; 
the Hfe is fundamentally clean and lovable. And re- 
ligion is stronger here than anywhere. In the city, 
churches are likely to become surrounded by an impervi- 
ous foreign population that steadily beats upon them and 
disintegrates the customary life; but in the suburbs the 
churches are strong. Many of them become influential 
centers of community life; their buildings are often ar- 
tistic; their ministers cultivated and effective person- 
alities. Next to the exquisite life of a few famous streets 
in a few of the greatest cities, the life of the suburbs is 
the finest in America. Of its own class, as compared with 
England, for example, it is better educated, more 
reasonable in its judgment of national matters, more 
pedagogic, more earnest for the best tilings in the field 
of culture, more prophetic of the next generation's 
achievement. In the churches there are more college 
men than in the same area in England; and in the 
homes, more college-bred matrons than anywhere in the 
world. 



Metropolitan and Suburban Emotions 129 



The psychology of the suburban life has been partly 
indicated in the foregoing description; but it may be 
expounded a little more in detail. 

Take the matter of the domesticity of the suburbs first, 
and there are some reservations to be remarked in the 
general good. The domestic sentiment works out good 
homes, and it develops a feeling for the future of child- 
hood, and a real judgment as to the best ways of educating 
children institutionally. But the feeling is often far from 
sound in its applications to the individual life. Too much 
is made of the children. They are emphasized apart from 
their natural environment. Their rights are often treated 
as isolated from the general life. Men and women have 
rights also, and they are connected with those of childhood 
and youth, and not supplanted by them. It sometimes 
seems as if the suburbs became a monster mothers' meet- 
ing, so prominent are domestic and educational matters, 
and so feminine the educational leaders. And even when 
the children are grown up and are gone to college or trade, 
the center of interest is still their career, the subject of 
talk also, and the cause of little jealousies, hardly ex- 
pressed, but quite noticeable to the observer. The result 
is that, despite the gracious opportunities of suburban 
life, the children are no better mannered than children of 
less chance. They are oblivious of their elders' rights, 
and when they go out into the world they suffer long be- 
cause of their undisciplined bringing-up. 

This is only another aspect of the parochialism of the 
suburban life. The community tends to live its own 
meanings so far as they are conscious, apart from intimate 
contact with the city, always, when going thither, going 
with the remembrance that the tents and treasure are at 



130 The Temper of the American People 

home: always, so to speak, handling city life as a stranger 
who keeps his gloves on and refuses to be at home; al- 
ways aware of the train service that takes him home; 
always a little fidgety till he gets there. This is not the 
worst, however, for the suburban's provincialism cuts him 
off from the other parts of the suburban region. He does 
not meet his fellows from adjacent areas of Suburbia on 
his own territory, and he does not go to meet them on 
theirs. Suburbia thus tends to become a collection of 
villages, with the village prejudice, and the local suspi- 
cion of social rights. In a certain city, largely surburban, 
where the population is probably the most educated, 
refined, and moral in the entire country, it is impossible to 
get the finer elements of the scattered communities to- 
gether and create a society worthy of this necromantic 
name. The few stimulating people of each locality know 
each other; but they do not know similar people in other 
parts of the city, and they do not seem to care to know. 
The result is disastrous for society. If by a rare chance 
there is a common gathering, each set of people from each 
locality holds together, and makes no advance beyond the 
already known. Each seems to be socially incompetent 
to break down the wall. This is largely due to social 
inexperience, and it will take another generation to over- 
come it. Meanwhile, the suburbs, though clean, and 
morally noble, are said to be rather dull places to live 
in, if one keeps the mind upon social and intellectual 
life and interests. 

One must therefore be ready for decided limits in the 
intellectual life of the suburban community. The men 
are immersed in business, and so the women dominate 
the intellectual field. And the field is over-organized. 
College men keep up club life, but only for social or pro- 
fessional purposes. The women graduates of colleges 



Metropolitan and Suburban Emotions 131 

keep alive the memory of their collegiate experience by 
membership in the local college club, which becomes an 
efiFective advertisement of the college. The women who 
do not have the advantages of college training form clubs 
of their own, where, in numbers from a dozen to several 
hundred, they take all learning for their province. In 
their meetings they listen to speakers who have gained a 
little estimation in literature, art, or reform, to whom 
they attend more uncritically than to their own members. 
The knowledge esteemed most impressive is enclyclo- 
psedic, — not to know a thing is deemed a kind of dis- 
grace, — but meanwhile little originality is developed, 
and any outspoken opinion is rare. Intellectually, as 
well as socially, these clubs are apt to be inexperienced. 
They are not to blame for this, of course, but sometimes 
they sin against the light, when they refuse to go to ac- 
cessible sources of competent direction, and so miss a 
really educational and orderly progression through their 
chosen fields. For until education loses the marks of 
its own attainment, and sinks the materials in a generous 
concept of life, in short, until it ministers to character 
and especially to joy, it is. only another kind of a trade, 
and it deadens, rather than increases, humanistic 
delight. 

We shall see something of the structure and sentiments 
of society in a later chapter, but a word or two may be 
set down here about society in these suburban areas. 
On the whole it is a paradox. While everything else 
centers in the home, society is not domestic but institu- 
tional. The churches have their social gatherings, which 
are used as means of bringing people into a rough sort of 
connection, and affording a preliminary stage in social 
relations. The clubs have relations of the same kind in a 
mass form. And there are organizations that aim at 



132 The Temper of the American People 

wholly social results. But there is little domestic society. 
Few suburbans feel competent in money or experience to 
give the ideal entertainment, as when a few choice spirits 
gather about a table and talk during dinner. The do- 
mestic servant looms threateningly here, of course, but 
even so, the stress is laid too much on institutional gather- 
ings, mass receptions, — numbers. Women spend time 
going from one reception to another, and ending with no 
permanent friendships. Men meet at "banquets," where 
they hear some imported speakers; but because these 
gatherings are what Matthew Arnold would have called 
"sheer" — that is, made up of men engaged in the same 
enterprises, — there is no variety of experience, no final 
friendships, — only the pushing of particular interests. 

And what about the artistic feelings of a suburban 
region? one curiously asks. The art is domestic of course. 
The houses are often good, — some of them extremely 
good, — others are merely pretentious, and show signs 
only of money spent. Some of the worst are pathetic sur- 
vivals of the most horrible period in American architecture, 
the period just after the War. Suburban furniture is often 
a mixture of all styles, as the families, slowly growing in 
means, leave marks of each increment of wealth in a kind 
of stratification. When the inhabitants gain a real com- 
petence, the result is not infrequently a pleasurable sur- 
prise in absolute fitness of style, as expert judgment is 
called in, or as the hostess may herself have grown in 
knowledge, due to actual instruction in a college or school. 
The pictures are improving each decade, and are gener- 
ally copies of the old masters; though these are too often 
chosen because others have them, and one desires to be 
in style. They do not always show marks of originality in 
selection, and, moreover, they are often spoiled by poor 
arrangement, as different kinds are frequently thrust into 



Metropolitan and Suburban Emotions 133 

an expostulating proximity. There is perhaps a Kttle 
monotony in picturing Europe on the walls so thoroughly, 
resulting in a feeling of archaeological oppression; but 
one thinks of the next generation born into this atmosphere 
and the freedom that comes as a birthright to those so 
born. On the whole the artistic sense of the American 
suburban community exceeds that of similar regions in 
England. The London shopman would have less chance 
of selling his outrageously patterned carpet on the ground 
that "This gives it a finish, Sir," in America than in 
England. Indeed, the fault is beginning to run the other 
way; for the demand for neutral tones in oriental rugs, 
or faded effects in furnishing, is leading to a new science 
of imitation in which the real riches of the best colors are 
toned down to look antique. 

In morals, the suburban community is clearer in the 
pursuit of its goals than in some of the foregoing par- 
ticulars. The homes are moral, the community is moral, 
and the clubs become proposers of philanthropies and 
reforms that make for the common good. The tendency 
goes to extremes, naturally, and the observer is often 
humorously inclined to question whether the nation as a 
whole is worth its existence, when he hears the diagnoses 
of the numerous doctors, who, like Peacock's McQueedy, 
would "put you right on that point." In Suburbia every 
moral proposal is embraced and forwarded. Houses are 
freely opened for the presentation of the reform, money is 
given, and real interest is aroused. It is true that some 
of these reforms are espoused as a means of getting social 
recognition. Sometimes a vulgar social climber will 
open her house, and make an elaborate display to coerce 
her neighbors into accepting her at her own valuation; 
and too often the community will go to these serio-comic 
meetings, instead of standing on a dignified ground. But 



134 The Temper of the American People 

on the whole these reforms are sincerely accepted and 
managed with skill. 

Suburban religious feeling would require a chapter by 
itself. Its prime concern is with individual character; 
for the sins of society, as they exist in the greater cities, 
hardly get a footing in this rarer field. Hence the pulpit 
becomes a place of prophecy, a source of spiritual sig- 
nificance, a more intellectual and personal thing than in 
the city. The church is also social, knowing its own 
people, assembling for converse and entertainment, dis- 
cussions, and any mode of social contact. It has not the 
struggles of the city church; it can hardly come in contact 
with the greatest problems at first hand; but it can give 
money, and time, and this indeed it does and largely. 
In its own field its main business seems to be to keep itself 
unspotted from the world, and to train up young people 
within it who shall go out into the national life with 
well-instructed minds, and clean hands and hearts. It 
also welcomes newcomers warmly into the community 
and builds up the social fabric. Is not this only another 
form of an old, old task, — the building of the City of 
God? 



CHAPTER VII 

INDUSTRIAL ATTITUDES IN AMERICA 



THE first outstanding aspect of American industrial- 
ism, that impresses the observer who is detached from 
it himself, is its immense seriousness. In Europe there 
are other interests that mitigate the ferocity of industry, 
— circles of light whence emanate vague influences of a 
spiritual kind, or powers like those of historical imagina- 
tion or social grace, that either modify or deny the usurpa- 
tions of commercialism. In some countries industry is 
still reckoned an aside, or looked upon as a late accretion 
on the national life, and judged by those of the older 
order as obstructive of all the finer motions of the soul. 

In these regions, until lately, one had to apologize for 
being in trade. It was a worse blot on the escutcheon 
than some stain of blood that may have shaded it in a 
former age. Though this extreme position is changing in 
a day when three per cent consols do not furnish enough 
income to meet the extravagance of modern living, there 
is still a great difference between the European and the 
American attitude towards trade. 

In America the serious eagerness of the world of men 
engaged in industry is marked. There is a look of fixed 
preoccupation on the faces of all, — the toilers and those 
who direct the toil, — perhaps most on the latter. For 
industry partakes somewhat of the high seriousness of 
science. It was always scientific in a loose kind of way, 



136 The Temper of the American People 

the only way in general in which economics can be scien- 
tific, because of the fluctuations due to the personal equa- 
tion; but it now attempts scientific detail in far greater 
rigor than ever before. Centralization began to be effec- 
tive during the War, both as regards capital and the 
organization of industry; but this movement has gone on 
much further of late, especially in the organization of the 
units of labor. Laboratory science in industry is not 
specifically American, indeed, Germany probably leads 
the way; but America has raised up high-priests of sci- 
entific shop-management, who will take apart and set 
together again, in far better order, the complicated 
machine of a factory system, or who will eliminate un- 
necessary motions in the rudest tasks of labor. 

This seriousness shows itseK in the result of the new 
science already mentioned which concerns itself, first of 
all, with the problem of time in a far from metaphysical 
sense. The American is bound to consider the time ele- 
ment with more carefulness than the European, because 
it is costly in the highest degree. Hence the "shop 
expert" gives attention to the management of "pace," 
that is, the minimum time a given task should take. But 
the expert is only the discoverer in a recording sense, for 
the employer long ago moved blindly to these goals, as 
two house-painters talking while at work had found out. 
"When wages is what they is now, John," said one to the 
other, "the best thing you can do is to keep still. The 
firms has got the choice picked out, and if you don't 
belong to the choice, you can't stay there." The Euro- 
pean works much slower than the American, not simply 
because his tools are poorer, but because he does not use 
his nervous energy at so high a tension as a rule. Few 
workmen like to work rapidly, and there are organized 
objections in America to high speed, but after these have 



Industrial Attitudes in America 137 

been as obstructive as possible, the American works faster 
than the European. This appHes, of course, to the 
workers who are native or long resident; the recent im- 
portations are not altogether as effective. In textile 
industries the pace is said to be faster in England than in 
America, but this is due to the foreign labor commonly 
used in America, which is often misplaced, working at a 
different business from the one known at home. But in 
industries where there is more individual scope the pace 
is decidedly faster than in Europe. The American not 
only works faster, he walks faster, — everything he does 
is done more fiercely. He is increasing his pace con- 
tinually, so that, like the workman in England, who 
remarked the silence when the machinery broke down, 
the American is likely to find the pace "awful when 
it stops." 

This economy of time, as we have seen, is direct and 
recorded. The time-registering machines do not guess 
at the minutes it takes a factory girl to do a task; they 
take account of the exact minutes, test whether she is 
slower or faster than the average, and work out a remorse- 
less statistical law. The best overseer can only guess; 
but the clock makes no false report. So in the oflBce the 
loose ledger and card index permit the removal of old 
material that only stands in the way. 

Not only does the pace go on in growing acceleration 
in a given industry, but the movement is fast from one 
industry to another. The American who does not "get 
on" fast enough, may, as likely as not, throw up his job 
overnight and try a new one. The industrial history of 
an American workman is frequently a chapter of the most 
startling changes. The present work he is doing is no 
indication of the work he formerly did. Hence highly 
trained mechanics are extremely hard to get, mainly 



138 The Temper of the American People 

because workmen do not stay in a trade long enough to 
master it thoroughly. 

The American has given almost as much thought to 
the other industrial problem of the economy of space, 
which makes for economy of time as well as economy of 
overhead charges. Hence the factory system is one of 
large open areas, where one man can overlook many 
workers; where the raw materials do not retrace their 
movements as they are handed on; and where the workers 
are placed in a consistent series in order to handle the 
product with little loss of time as it grows into completion. 
There are time and space saving devices, that remind one 
of the close consistency of a ship's cabin, and yet there 
is light and airiness, because the new structural art uses 
steel framework, or a concrete shell, for reasons much 
like those that determined the old Gothic builders to 
develop piers and arches, namely, the need of windows. 
The new industrial structural art thus has relations with 
the older art, though at present it has not found the secret 
of beauty to any great degree. It is a windowed style, 
however, as the Gothic was. 

The American machines are close and compactly built; 
often small, certainly lighter than those of European 
manufacture on the whole, and the tools are of smaller 
size and less awkward to handle. In the size of packages, 
however, the national parsimony of materials and space 
does not seem to count. The immense packages that the 
teamsters handle impress one as far larger than those 
common in Europe. And this has been a decided disad- 
vantage to America in the open markets of the world; 
for many countries do not have the means of handling 
great cases of goods, and so refuse to buy what must be 
repacked before it can be carried into the country, where 
only primitive methods of transportation are in use. But 



Industrial Attitudes in America 139 

in other respects, if industry in general is brutal, in Ameri- 
can machines it shows a few aesthetic values, and is partly 
human in lifting dead weight from the muscles and bones 
of men. Of course, it is still possible that a new and 
unseen tyranny may take its place, that oppresses men 
nervously and mentally. 

Until recently, the economy of materials was a lost 
art in America. Perhaps negligence was due to the in- 
grained wastefulness of people to whom Providence had 
been almost too kind. The man brought up to the 
carelessness of the average farm was not too likely to 
be careful of materials that cost hard cash instead of a 
little extra labor. And his employer, who wrestled with 
the panic demand for his goods in the height of the sea- 
son, and besides, knew that labor was often more expen- 
sive than material waste, was not quite the man to be an 
effective mentor when it came to economy of raw, or 
partly finished, materials. But times have changed, 
and the American is considering by-products and waste 
material as never before, to find, in many cases, that these 
rejected margins constitute the only real source of his 
profit. 

II 

These marks of American industry, however, do not 
indicate the factors in more than a partial way. It 
would be hard, indeed, to approach to finality in a field 
as yet so casually explored, especially as the factor of 
personality has not, so far, been more than mentioned. 
To this factor we now turn. 

At the very lowest range of American industrial life 
there are the unskilled laborers. For several reasons 
these are more numerous than in England. One is, that 
there is more unskilled work to do, so that America is 



140 The Temper of the American People 

the paradise of the unskilful. There are more of the 
aboriginal tasks here than anywhere, — more digging and 
draining, roadniaking, mining and building, more growing 
of crops. This is not solely because the country is yet 
pioneer in large Western regions, but also because America 
in each generation chooses to pull down and build greater. 
Besides, there are more ways of using unskilled labor, 
through the introduction of machines that work automati- 
cally and require only a few simple motions kept up, and 
little original interest in the process, — if it can be called 
a process when the thing done is so simple. Moreover, 
there is much unskilled labor that is labor working out of 
its own practised range, as an immigrant takes the first 
job he can find, in which he may be as unhandy as if he 
had not a trade of his own, but was an unskilled laborer 
pure and simple. 

On the next stage are the partly skilled; and these con- 
stitute the largest class. Few Americans know their 
trade well; many are "making a bluff" at a better job 
than they have had before. This is the more common 
because employers think well of those who are determined 
to get on, and patiently bear with inefficiency if it 
promises well for the morrow. A good workman is so 
infrequent a prodigy that employers are apt to treat 
him well and offer "inducements" to keep him. Domes- 
tic servants are partly skilled or unskilled; often just 
enough is known to prevent the learning of a better way. 

Then there come the skilled workers, a dwindling col- 
ony, often enough foreign, especially in the more delicate 
crafts; but whether native or not, men who would be a 
credit to any country because of dexterity of touch, and 
a quick apprehension of unusual situations. While the 
American workman is not so good as the English, he is 
swifter to take advantage of any device to save time or 



Industrial Attitudes in America 141 

money; he is more sober than the EngHshman, and does 
much more work in the same time. Hence when speedy 
contracts are to be let, the American can take them, — 
building bridges, or laying eighteen hundred bricks a day 
to the Englishman's four hundred. On the whole, the 
American gives the impression of liking work more than 
the Englishman, though Professor Barrett Wendell thinks 
him far less virtuous in this respect than the Frenchman, 
observing: "I do not remember that I ever saw a French 
boy whittle a stick." 

Among American workmen one rarely finds the studi- 
ousness that can be found among some English artisans 
who have been to evening schools or workingmen's col- 
leges; but the observer detects a surer instinct for the 
direction in which pecuniary success may be found. For 
the American workman, more often than his English fel- 
low, thinks of a future escape from bondage into a higher 
place, or even into a business of his own. On the other 
hand, this preoccupation with life on the solely economic 
field prevents the workman from coming into contact 
with a more generous hfe, and marks him off too sharply 
from other ranges of experience. The industrial revo- 
lution has made the gaps between the higher ranges of 
life less impassable, but when we remember that in ear- 
lier days the workman as apprentice was a member of 
his master's family, and often married his master's daugh- 
ter and succeeded to his business, the gulf between the 
lower ranges seems to have grown wider. 

Next there are the subordinate clerks, who have less 
wages than the skilled artisans, with an appearance of 
social respectability to keep up, and demands that the 
workman escapes. And with these there are the man- 
agers of departments in distributing agencies, whose places 
are a httle better. These have no union to strengthen 



142 The Temper of the American People 

them, and they are being pressed to the wall by the inva- 
sion of women who enter the field triumphantly. The 
most difficult situation today is faced by these persons, 
who have hopes other than the manual worker, yet receive 
less payment, and are likely to see women enter their 
field conqueringly. There are many pathetic cases of 
clerks in banks, or in offices, who have been left in painful 
respectability by these causes, or by the syndication of 
their firm with others and the consequent elimination of 
positions. These are between the millstones that grind 
to powder, — organized capital, and organized labor; 
and from these ranks Socialism gains adherents. 

Then follow the managers, the proprietors, and the 
shareholders, whose incomes are in the first economic 
class, — of $5000 a year or more, and whose chief care 
is to make good returns to the shareholders, or to satisfy 
the manager above them who may have a controlling inter- 
est in the business. The aim of these is to make the 
plant effective, to work it to the utmost, to get all out of 
labor that can be legitimately obtained, and sometimes 
illegitimately. This is the field where there are startling 
and miraculous changes, as a high-school boy, in ten years 
or so, becomes the partner of a banking house; or a mill- 
worker in a half -lifetime gains control of a business profit- 
able enough to permit him to build a French chateau; or 
another subordinate to gather the greatest collection of 
Dutch artists in any private hands; or another to give 
away money enough to buy an ancient empire; or another 
to amass wealth sufficient to suborn a nation's ideals. 
In this region, too, there is the other side of industrial 
life, — the displacement of the unfortunate, the in- 
fluence of nepotism, the fact of failure. But in America 
failures do not count; the successes are so great and 
spectacular. 



Industrial Attitudes in America 143 

III 

When we turn to consider the feelings of Americans 
towards this great method of hfe we must look at three 
phases: the feelings of labor, of capital, and of the people 
who are outside the extremely organized zones, — the 
professional classes, and the more critical observers. 

What, then, are the feelings of labor towards this huge 
creation of its hands? 

The first outstanding feeling is one of restlessness. A 
partial cause of this is the ebb and flow of the demand 
for labor. The work goes by seasons much more than in 
England. Every muscle and nerve is strained during the 
season to increase the output and satisfy the ravenous 
demand of the moment. When this is sated, in the lan- 
guage of the worker, "there is nothing doing." These 
periods of strain are often times of high wages that lead 
to a rise in extravagant expenses; then follows a time of 
intermittent employment and lower wages, and the pinch 
of living becomes sharp. The laborer then feels poorer 
than if his work had been moderately paid and more 
steady. Moreover, he loses his economic equanimity, 
grows reckless, and spends more foolishly when idle than 
when at work. While seeking work he has leisure to look 
at those better off, and the beginning of discontent, far 
from divine, urges him to unwise action. Thus there is 
developed the larger part of labor violence, strikes, and 
that "solution of continuity" that has always marked 
American industrial life. 

The apparent irresponsibility of the great industrial 
scheme of things, that injures the just with the unjust, 
that surfeits the market and starves a babe, has made 
the American workman strive to regulate the tale of his 
products. The observer alternately smiles and weeps at 



144 The Temper of the American People 

the proposals of labor unions in America, or at the pro- 
grams of the uninstructed body of philanthropists 
that meddles in legislation with its panaceas of economic 
reform; but he can sympathize with the underlying 
motive. The limitation of product by arbitrary rules, 
or the shirking of work, is a foolish way to the end in 
view; so is many a strike, that often eats up in the cost 
of economic war several years' increment in advance, 
and what is worse, sows seeds of recklessness in the 
workman's life that he never quite uproots. What he 
is dimly striving for is a steadier work, a more reason- 
able wage, the security of the salaried man. He has 
given bonds to fortune, now he demands that fortune 
shall pledge something to him. Hence the struggles 
that must seem strange to the incoming immigrant, who 
has been taught to see in America a land of promise. 
The strangeness soon wears away, however, and he 
becomes himself a participant in vindictive outbreaks 
against law and order as he strikes blindly at one more 
tyranny. 

Here we must note the violence of American industrial 
life. Outbreaks are commoner than in England, because 
all America is less law-abiding; and violence is pushed 
further by the alien crowds that madly act on instinctive 
lines. The native violence grows out of the lack of dis- 
cipline in the home, which in turn makes order in the 
school far from a general thing, in the truest sense. And 
this is accentuated by an easy complaisance with frivolous 
excesses in the storm and stress period of youth, when 
collegians have the moods of more than literary careless- 
ness that the Romantics had a hundred years or more 
ago, without, however, the philosophic seriousness that 
dignified their outbreaks against the conventional life. 
If labor looks on the spectacle of a lot of college youths 



Industrial Attitudes in America 145 

on a "racket," it is more than human nature can stand 
to suppose that these excesses are for the privileged few. 
The example is bound to have an effect, and the effect is 
likely to be different in application from what is expected. 

Added to the general example of carelessness, there 
are on the part of the foreigner natural differences leading 
to the difficulty of understanding; and suspicion, that 
often ripens into tragedy fast enough. The differences 
are bad indeed when two strong men meet who are of 
the same race; but they grow immensely heightened 
when many weak men meet the one who differs, or the 
many. History tells us that in a simpler age, old polit- 
ical troubles were sometimes mitigated by arranging the 
birth of a royal heir upon the subjugated territory; but 
men are not so naive today, and capital does not seek a 
birthplace in the discontented province of labor. Labor is 
not only alien in race, it is alien in intention. It is not 
actually and ideally American, and this difference makes 
more cold the mechanical modes of contact, which are 
mass-modes and therefore inhuman. When the workers 
are all Greeks, and the master an American, or the workers 
are Poles and the staff American, it is plain that the point 
of contact vanishes to a mere touching place, and mis- 
understandings increase and grow bitter. America is 
not a paradise yet, though seen from Warsaw or the 
Russian Ghetto it looks inviting. Dynamite outrages 
have occurred in the locality where the highest wages 
are paid, — where workingmen's wives have been empty- 
ing the stores of their silver-backed toilette accessories, 
and where to lay bricks is a surer way to a competence 
than to enter a profession. 

All these feelings are stern preventers of happiness. 
The American laborer is a joyless creature. This is true 
of the man in the best position to get the substantial goods 



146 The Temper of the American People 

of life, — the agriculturist, — siace he leaves his farm for 
the city when he can. No ploughman writes odes to the 
daisy, or to anything else. And the lack of happiness is 
far more the case with the industrialized man in the city. 
No jovial soap-boiler sings at his work; instead, he fur- 
tively plays cards. The worker has lost the instinct that 
feels its way to happiness, and the monotony of his work 
has made him a creature without diversity of relations 
through which happiness is likely to surprise the soul. 
He can only enjoy excitement, or he stolidly accepts his 
lot. Few workingmen enter the art galleries, museums, 
or other aesthetic institutions; if one finds unmistakable 
workmen there, they are probably men of Mediterranean 
races. Few play at games themselves; they would rather 
sit down to see others play when they can get the money 
to see anything. Few are students of literature, or have 
any hobbies that lift them up for the moment into a self- 
directed life, through which, so far as the end sought is 
disinterested, distinction can be attained. Few have a 
little plot of ground and thus enjoy the primal gifts of 
nature. The only advantage of the American workman 
over his English brother is the larger likelihood that he 
may escape from his place into a better, though this chance 
is narrowing every year. While he remains a workman, 
he is far behind his English fellow in power of joy, or of 
the ability to be happy. 

The old workman's character is gone. The workman 
does not love his work. Artistry has departed, and with 
it the self-respect and dignity of the creator who has given 
to the world what no other man can. Mr. Arthur Symons 
asks plaintively: "Has any beautifully made thing come 
out of America since we colonized it?" Among the 
workers the youth are noisy, rude, unintelligent; the mid- 
dle-aged tired and quiescent; the elders "played out" 



Industrial Attitudes in America 147 

and pathetically uncertain what is to become of them 
after they are fifty years old. "Dignity," says a keen 
observer of the rural worker in France, — "Dignity I 
should set down as the quintessential characteristic of 
the French peasant." Could we say as much for the 
worker in America? How far industrialism has moved 
away from the human values ! 

No longer does religion make its old appeal to the 
worker. Under the pressure of his present situation he 
does not look for ultimate consolations, and the churches 
grow serious as they consider the new aspects that con- 
temporary life pushes to the front. 

Yet in one respect there is some hope; and that is in the 
new and rude morals of loyalty that the worker is devel- 
oping. At present these are noisily and offensively 
phrased, — "To stand by the union and hate a scab," — 
a kind of Old Testament morality of closed sympathy 
and determined cohesion within the particular mass. 
But this rude schooling, perhaps, will at last make him 
come to higher standards, especially if the world in gen- 
eral also grows more ready to accept them. For the 
morals he accepts, the worker is willing to undergo much, 
privation, pain, contempt, and in a few cases perhaps 
death. This dumb, and often unreasoning, loyalty, is 
the last stand his soul makes against the exactions of an 
industrialism, that take away many of the old personal 
prerogatives of labor. In a sense, it may be the last bit 
of morality left, or the first dawn of another system of 
ethics, in the worker's scheme. Wise indeed would it 
be for the other side of industrialism to reckon this in, 
as it tries to come to conclusions about the matter, — to 
welcome loyalty and direct it towards ends that are good 
for all the state, instead of treating it as irrational and 
inexplicable. 



148 The Temper o/ the American People 

IV 

Turning to consider the emotions of capital, we are 
immediately struck with the prevalence of suspicion and 
incertitude. The large organizations built up by money 
have not been generally applauded. Many people failed 
to appreciate the benevolence of a trust that reduced the 
price of a commodity, but forced the purchaser unwillingly 
to minister to an already swollen fortune. A tacit oppo- 
sition to these larger combinations of capital is now wide- 
spread; and the consequence is, that capital has to be 
forearmed, apprehensive, and defensive. Organized labor 
gives it endless trouble; so does organized public senti- 
ment that makes itself felt in State legislatures, where, 
often enough, capital is harshly treated and unjustly 
fettered. Capital seeks to evade these tyrannies, by 
transporting its instruments to a region less suspicious, 
or by procuring a charter from a state easier to deal with 
than its natural home. Thus at the start capital is party 
to an armed truce. 

Further, capital is quite as troubled by competition 
within its own field. The arts of securing trade are often 
invidious, and many a man has felt more than a qualm 
as he entered this region, where, as in love, all means are 
reputed to be fair, though not all are noble. A long chap- 
ter of legislation is being written as a result of the com- 
petitive arts being pushed beyond the bounds of morals. 
Excessive advertising, treating of buyers, rebates in 
freight, actual bribery, make an exacting toll on capital, 
or on the consumer at the end. Capital has gone, therefore, 
to the utmost extreme in many cases, first by destroying 
costly rivals through underselling, and second, by offering 
the biggest bribe of all, — buying them out at a price 
beyond the real valuation of their plant and good-will. 



Industrial Attitudes in America 149 

In this field of rivalry there is not even an armed truce; 
there is actual, open, acknowledged war, with the pri- 
meval instincts in control, and brutality in the saddle 
riding over everything. 

The driving force of all this is the desire to "get results," 
and results mean a private fortune for the proprietor, 
or dividends for the stockholders. The desire is not 
peculiarly American; but the intensity of the demand 
is American, and the frequent accomplishment of the 
desire is American too. The American capitalist has an 
instinct for "paying propositions"; he ventures more 
than his English compeer because the sudden needs and 
opportunities of the country opened a way; and his ven- 
tures have more nearly answered his expectation. Divi- 
dends are desired and dividends are forthcoming. If 
his factory does not pay when it turns out one kind of 
product, he changes to another, as in the case of carriage- 
makers, or bicycle firms, who turned to automobiles. 
The Englishman in a similar situation is apt to "die in 
the last ditch," obstinately following the old order; but 
the American leaves his ditch to find more open ground. 
Keen sight of conditions, adaptability, instinct for suc- 
cess, something of the prophetic vision though not the 
prophetic ideals, — these are the qualities of the Ameri- 
can capitahst. 

But what about the capitalistic ethics? What is the 
American business man's feeling of right? The American 
business man, apart from the acute moments of competi- 
tion, and not always excluding these, is a man of reasonable 
conscience. It is said that in a certain trade, seventy-five 
per cent of the business men would take advantage in 
small details if they had the chance; but this is because 
many of them came up from the bench, w here they learned 
to take advantage of the employer, or were schooled in 



150 The Temper of the American People 

the smaller parsimonies of little businesses. It is noto- 
rious that self-made men are harder to deal with than 
those born to a h,igher place. At the other extreme there 
are the immense collections of capital, in which the soul 
of the ordinary man gets smothered, and he becomes a 
party to industrial methods that do not exactly illustrate 
the moral law. But in the cases where the capitalists 
have had some entrance into a more liberal life, or where 
the capitalization is too large to allow an easy access into 
the higher places for ill-furnished men, or where the fun- 
damental humanity of a man in a smaller way of trade has 
not been injured, the average honesty is good. 

One suspects that business credit is better in America 
than in England, and that, for example, fewer of the 
dwellers in Suburbia have gone through bankruptcy or 
liquidation than men in similar regions in the United 
Kingdom. In the little details of business there are 
fewer small or mean savings in management. The Amer- 
ican is generous as far as he can be; many of the things 
he feels driven to do he laments, tries to justify himself 
somewhat waveringly, hopes soon to be able to do with- 
out them, and at last does escape from them, by finding 
that strict honesty is the best policy in the end. He 
hopes to get beyond the debatable ground in time by 
making a fortune, or a secure organization; or he hopes 
for a general change in business methods tending to greater 
rectitude; or he looks for a general prosperity that may 
lighten competition and allow him enough business, with- 
out using doubtful modes of getting it or carrying it on. 
At present he is not exactly comfortable, as his excuses 
show, when he tries to justify himself by the general 
practice. The theoretic observer will feel some sympathy 
for him; he is the creature of forces he has called into 
being, without exactly knowing what their nature is. 



Industrial Attitudes in America 151 

The ideal of the American capitahst is not that of Eng- 
land or the Continent. In Europe there are the allure- 
ments of an older society, and a life that bases itself on 
the land, — possession of it, enjoyment of it. In America 
many business men came from the land, and remember 
their early hardships too well to feel that the most ideal 
life is there. While the American may put money in an 
estate, he only puts it in as a plaything; his larger invest- 
ments are elsewhere. He differs from the European in 
having no expectation of retirement; he always sees 
himself as still engaged in something, preferably something 
greater than he had managed up to that time. Public 
opinion reenforces his feeling that retirement, even for a 
man who has done a fair day's work, is hardly the manly 
thing to do. He hopes to die "in the harness." His 
ideal is not to found a business and then leave it to his 
sons to carry on, while he, like Sir William Temple, 
watches cabbages grow, — or goes fishing with Izaak Wal- 
ton, — or becomes a collector of rare pictures or books; 
it is to do all these things while business still goes on and he 
directs it. He likes, as he expresses it, "to run things." 
So far as he has an ideal, — apart from the brute function- 
ing of his brain, that conceives of life as a "harness," and 
himself as most chivalrous when he wears it to the end, — 
it is to organize a business untU it reaches an aesthetic qual- 
ity of automatic precision, so that he has only to touch 
the keys to get an assured result. He has no interest 
in business history; the story of a Dombey and Son would 
not appeal to him; but he has an immense interest in 
business organization, — in making a perfect machine 
that functions without waste. This is his fairest ideal. 

In America, then, we get the finest bloom of industrial- 
ism. It has not only a country to itself, but a whole 
continent, where it is unhampered by history, traditions, 



152 The Temper of the American People 

or the ghostly instincts founded in the past experience of 
the race, and kept aUve by continuous forms of society. 
The individual has come to himself in industrial forms 
more here than anywhere, and he can make ventures 
inconceivable in an older order. The entire structure of 
society is made to fit him, and if he succeeds he gains 
the applause of a great cloud of witnesses who understand 
precisely the difficulty of his task, and the powers that 
made success possible. There is no Faubourg St.-Germain 
to look coldly on his herculean labors, denying him his 
meed of praise, and saying that he is only a Corsican up- 
start. There are no delicate memories of hereditary 
chivalry to trouble and weaken his direct and concrete 
ideas. He is the creature of his environment, and his 
environment pushes him to his highest effectiveness. 
Aristocracy cannot long look down upon him, for he is 
founding families. Scholarship cannot snub him, for he 
has established academic schools that make the old col- 
leges look penurious. Society cannot sneer at him, for 
he is society. 

It is proper to remark here, that, as in the case of labor, 
there are some virtues often overlooked, and that an 
approach towards understanding the situation and mean- 
ing of capital, may come through considering the 
essential fact in capital itself. Capital has had many 
epithets leveled at it. It hardly ever stands alone in the 
popular speech: it is "brutal," "corrupt," "selfish," 
"soulless," in the rhetoric of the day. It may be these 
and more, in some of its applications; but at the end it 
is just as human as labor. It represents virtue as labor 
does; it is labor grown concrete, plus the rationality that 
accumulated it, plus the virtue of abstinence. It would 
not have existed if its accumulators had lived from hand 
to mouth; or again, if they had not been abstinent of 



Industrial Attitudes in America 153 

goods that were permitted to them. And some day, 
perhaps, in this fundamental fact at the heart of capital, 
the solutions of society may be found. If capital could 
abstain only a httle more, namely, from unfair incre- 
ments, — and if it could allow enough margin to labor 
so that labor could abstain too, — and if it could teach 
thrift by examples brought down to the common man's 
understanding, — some of the present diflBculties would 
disappear. 

V 

Industrialism has not come about in America all at 
once, but it has come fast, and now that it is here there 
are those who faintly lift up their voices, like Peterkin in 
the poem, to ask what it is all about. There has always 
been a stubborn remnant of men who deducted something 
from Adam Smith's panegyric on the making of a pin; — 
men who, while following the morals of industrialism, as 
Nietzsche, yet made a joke of it, as when this writer 
cried: "It was a master-stroke of English instinct to hal- 
low and begloom Sunday to such an extent that the 
Englishman unconsciously hankers for his week-day work 
again." And today occasional voices lift up a cry, or 
question, against it, affirming that science as applied to 
industry has done nothing for the workers but speeded 
them up." 

These are not to be quieted by references to progress, 
in historical comparisons, as when we are told that up 
to the time of the weaving of Queen Anne Boleyn's petti- 
coat, the looms were the same as those that made the robes 
of Semiramis, and that we are now rich because we have 
automatic monsters that lade our Monday bargain- 
counters. Lovers of men see some defects in a scheme 
that allows a thousand untrained men to work at tasks, 



154 The Temper of the American People 

under direction, that no one of them could perform 
alone. They still remain doubtful even when told that 
this system makes the per capita product as thirty-three 
to seven when compared with individual effort. There 
are some who feel that the mythical savage was good 
enough to be a reality, who went back to his tribe saying, 
— "I have tried civilization for forty years, and it is not 
worth the trouble." 

What the eulogists of industrialism lose sight of, is the 
price paid for these acknowledged goods. For the real 
question is not, whether these results are better than the 
results of the same kind in former times; but, whether 
they are better when all the former results are compared 
with all the results of today. In the estimate of civiliza- 
tion it is fatal to separate the factors when reckoning the 
value of the whole; for civilization is indeed a living thing. 
What would it profit us if the Athenian women could 
purchase machine-made fabrics and furniture, and if the 
men had been captains of industry, and there had been 
no Phidias, no Socrates, no Pericles? As a relic of a past 
civilization, would a scrap-heap be worth the stone-heap 
of the Acropolis? The only terms in which industry can 
be fairly judged are terms of the ideal values, and not 
terms of mass-product, — terms of the arts and the 
moralities, — terms of character. And it is precisely 
here that in America the general judgment is ominously 
silent. 

The industrial system has indeed become a tyranny. 
Those who stand high in it, too often try to dictate to 
the world the principles they have found useful, as uni- 
versally valid; and they listen with scant courtesy to 
the demands of the humanist. They have no time to 
play with sunbeams, to walk the colonnade of years, or 
to allow the ancient peace to fall upon them; for their 



Industrial Attitudes in America 155 

system demands constant attention and constant renewal. 
It is always on the verge of breaking down : it does break 
down. The chief parties to it live as those who live in 
war; and the third party to it, the consumer, lives as one 
who dwells upon an invaded territory. The employer 
cannot leave his business; the employee is fixed in a nar- 
row groove; both move at peril. 

Great organizations impress the imagination and make 
it accept unquestioningly things that it might stumble 
at when considered from the individual and aloof point 
of view. Moreover, men somehow feel that more scien- 
tific organization will eliminate these maladjustments, 
whereas the truth is, that not till we get away from the 
worship of machinery, to something of reverence for the 
man within it, shall we come in sight of a solution. In 
England the situation is bad enough, but in America one 
has to reckon as additional factors tending to make men 
mere items in manufacture, the greater scope of business, 
the sudden emergence of new dominations, the astonish- 
ingly changing elements of labor, and the foreign peoples 
that crowd the field. So overbearing has industrialism 
become, that the successful man is apt to treat learning 
more contemptuously than is the habit of the English 
manufacturer. While he founds a college, he may still 
smile at the academic mind, is suspected of forcing its 
conscience, and more and more welcomes to the manage- 
ment of institutions of learning men who "make things 
go" on the plan of industrial efficiency. 

In still another way the American industrial system 
has largely broken down. It gives no leisure to the men 
who manage it, and affords no power of using leisure to 
those who work within it. The American does not work 
the long hours of some other peoples, but he works faster, 
harder, and has not the strength to enjoy the leisure he 



156 The Temper of the American People 

wins. After being speeded up the only thing he longs for 
is rest, or an excitement that stirs his jaded nerves. The 
same is true of the employer who goes to the theater, not 
to see fine art, but to get a thrill. We have thus a new 
kind of slavery, without the boon that slavery gave to 
the older world, — the boon of leisure; and it is only in 
leisure, or the potency of it, that the character of men 
can ripen, and civilization bring forth its fairest fruits. 
The holidays of the business man are increasingly holi- 
days taken because of "nervous breakdown"; the hol- 
idays taken by employees are mostly holidays enforced 
when work is dull, or by a strike, with no expectation of 
pleasure, only a wavering hope that work may soon be 
found. Industrialism ought to find some way of resting 
men, or training them to discover possible satisfactions; 
but so far it is too concentrated on mechanical and pro- 
ductive eflBciency. 

Hence there results a steady dehumanizing of life. If 
it is possible to put unskilled labor at tasks under direc- 
tion that it could never do alone, does it not also follow 
that the lack of demanded initiative tends to stupefy the 
mind and deaden the soul? Industrial processes tend to 
simplification and repetition, and nowhere more than in 
America, and these necessarily limit the interest of the 
worker and he becomes simple too. It is urged that 
there is still scope for the outlet of original powers in the 
attempt of the worker to improve his machine; but the 
time pressure on labor is so great that he is apt to lack 
the will; besides, he is not likely to have the knowledge, 
since machinery is a closely articulated system in most 
trades, and a local improvement might be a disaster in 
the system as a whole. Again, it is thought that brute 
labor is lightened, and so it is in many trades, and no 
doubt a few take advantage of the lessened muscular 



Industrial Attitudes in America 157 

strain; but the nervous strain increases, and so a vacant 
time is only at the disposal of a vacant mind. 

We can learn something from the difiFerence between 
Sparta and Athens in this very matter. Sparta was a 
military socialism with a small demand on initiative, and 
the result was a minimum of individual character; but 
the individualism of Athens produced characters that 
amaze all time. So our industrial system turns out dread- 
fully uniform results in the minimum character of the 
workers in the system. Compared with the savage, as 
Bagehot points out, who lives by delicate inferences, and 
in a world peopled by supernatural fears, urged by pas- 
sionate loves and hates, with his life in jeopardy at the 
slightest misstep, the ordinary factory worker is a com- 
monplace man. He is a naked soul divested of all 
background, a depressing "product" of our modern in- 
dustrialism, with few ideas, few interests, few long 
thoughts of life; and he comes at last to be simply 
another machine added to the larger machine that men 
have made for him. 

At the most significant extreme, industrialism touches 
the life of woman; and touches often to soil. There are 
theoretic propagandists, who, with Olive Schreiner, 
affirm the industrial equality of woman with man, and the 
need of her entrance into his avocations, to [)rove to her- 
self that she is still his equal, and that she is still needed 
by him in the companionship of trade, as formerly in the 
companionship of the chase and war; and further that 
she has a right to take away from him some mechanic 
arts, to offset the crafts he has taken from her by his 
mechanical processes. But the theory does not work out 
results completely good in practice. For the industrial- 
ized woman cannot be the perfect home-maker, and so 
take care of the coming race. Nor can she take care of 



158 The Temper of the American People 

herself, but is likely to face terrible exactions in time, 
strength, and morals. And she does not prove her com- 
panionship with man, but rather becomes his most perti- 
nacious rival, and the one who beats him down in wages, 
and often thrusts him out of a place. The last word in 
this field is far from being said: it is only the first word, 
so far, that has been uttered. 

The factory woman, in America, is much like her sis- 
ter in England. In the textile trades she is actually her 
sister, for many of the operatives are of English descent 
or birth. Hence she needs no description. But there is 
another range of life where there are differences well 
marked from those that obtain in England. The unmar- 
ried girl in America, who works in the factory, is more 
alert, and may be better schooled, than her English sis- 
ter. The shop-girls are far less refined than in England, 
but they have a way of carrying themselves that indi- 
cates equality, or even superiority, when buyers require 
their services. The shop-girl can be exasperatingly super- 
cilious, and careful for nothing but the way her hair hap- 
pens to be done, or the dress some other shop-girl happens 
to wear. The office-girl is better, sometimes thoroughly 
fine and good, heroic, and noble. But on the whole the 
commercialized woman of the store or the office pays too 
much attention to her appearance, and spends more than 
she should upon dress, evidently, in many instances, 
going thither to try her luck in the matrimonial market. 
The end of such is to become a nervous, jaded creature 
of unoriginal ideas, — a feminine counterpart of the great 
army of clerks and small salaried officials, who feel most 
keenly the pressure of the day. 

The most fanatic philosopher need not expect that 
American industrialism will ever go back upon its steps. 
For it has real values of its own. It has cheapened prod- 



Industrial Attitudes in America 159 

ucts, and often it has made them really good, as in the 
instance of shoes, compared with English manufacture. 
Its machinery often takes on an aesthetic delicacy and fine- 
ness that denotes someone as having a feeling akin to art. 
It can make goods faster than any other country. It 
can organize itself astonishingly in the face of a new de- 
mand. But it needs to ask what it is all for, to aim at 
leisure and security, to tend to a fair distribution, above 
all to grow more human in its processes. It will be 
judged ultimately by the men it produces, and not the 
products. The right kind of men will produce the right 
kind of goods. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE ELEMENT OF CHANGE IN AMERICAN LIFE 



TO the Englishman, brought up in a reasonably fixed 
order of life, America seems the superlative of fluid- 
ity. Extraordinary indeed is the social motion in Amer- 
ica. But as motion per se it does not absolutely differ 
from the phenomena of older times, at least not as much 
as the street philosopher too readily assumes. 

Society has always been in motion. The far-off ances- 
tors of the modern man probably moved from some 
Himalayan slope, his nearer ancestors from the German 
forests or the fiords of Scandinavia; and since these larger 
movements there have been the subsidiary motions due 
to sentiment or avarice, such as the Crusades, or the 
Spanish exploitation of America, not to speak of Eliza- 
bethan passions clothed in more seemly names, now 
manifest in the struggle for colonial empire all over the 
world. In some aspects motion is more apparent in 
the older life than the new, because the older civilization 
was a bare civilization, without the impediment of a great 
equipment. The oldest societies were nomadic, and they 
moved from one environment to another with great ease 
since they had little to move, and because each new envi- 
ronment differed only slightly from the old. It was either 
less fertile or more fertile : it was not less complex or more 
complex in any appreciable degree. 

The motion of these earlier times was double in result. 



Element of Change in American Life 161 

On the one side the motion brought into contact equal, 
or nearly equal, forces, and superiority was held in the 
balance, and destiny suspended, with the attendant 
destruction of arable products and the delay of a better 
civilization. On the other side it resulted in the pene- 
tration of new territory when a tribe or race slowly ground 
its way through opposing forces, as the barbarians ground 
their way to Rome. Then the old instruments of civiliza- 
tion were destroyed or put to strange uses and inferior 
offices, and a new civilization slowly emerged. 

The most static order of life that we know is feudalism. 
There, indeed, men did find life fixed and in place, with 
instruments to match. It was an order that came intend- 
ing to stay, as we may plainly infer from the massive 
works of the time. In the region of more intangible 
things the same fixity held: the noble was a noble, and 
the serf a serf. Each had his fixed devoirs, his fixed pre- 
rogatives and perquisites, his fixed payment in protec- 
tion or cash, and his fixed scale of joys. The only way of 
democratic escape was by the door of the church. Yet 
in feudalism there were the insurgent passions of men. 
Baron fought against baron, and barons against the king; 
and states warred against each other, and cut up the map 
of Europe so changeably, that it becomes the despair of 
the historical student. And out of this most static soci- 
ety came the Crusades, — great streams of motive force 
and personal change, that left behind them notable marks 
upon the later history of Europe in the matters of speech, 
manners, science, economics, and religion. 

Yet society, in the larger masses, is more static today 
than ever before; for it has more effective and compli- 
cated instruments, and it cannot vacate the utilities it 
has created without immense loss. These instruments 
are not so movable as the furniture of earlier days, for 



162 The Temper of the American People 

they are related to each other by imagination in the shape 
of credit, and they are connected in reaUty by depend- 
ence on a highly specialized type of industry, which in 
turn is part of a system that can stand only a fractional 
shock compared with the shocks of ruder times. In our 
day, militant or moving states would meet more obstruc- 
tions, if they started on an invading march, than in the 
past. There are no universal powers as in the older 
world. Nationalities are becoming the units of a grandi- 
ose comity that tends towards equality, and some hope 
towards real fraternity. Any nation emerging to the 
front is not so overwhelmingly powerful as it would have 
been in former times; there are others so nearly its peers 
that it must move cautiously. And the new forms of 
territorial life take away the power of impact. Nations 
are not solid physical entities, for colonization has tended 
to fragmentariness, and possession of distant territories 
has given them vast unknown forces to direct or intimi- 
date, that might break out at any time if a great change 
in the national estate took place. 



n 

In spite, however, of all these historical caveats that 
seem to deny any overwhelmmg movements in modern 
times, the man who considers life still feels that we have 
a peculiar motion in our own day, more notable in some 
respects than the movements of former ages. And he 
also feels that in America this movement is most impres- 
sive in its manifestation. 

The modern motion is less one of nationality than of 
units wnthm the nationality. This means that it is motion 
less continuous in one given direction. In the older 
changes society moved all one way as an avalanche; but 



Element of Change in American Life 163 

today there is movement both ways. America has a 
stream of immigration coming to the country from Europe 
and the East; but part of the stream, notably the Itahan 
part, goes back again. From twenty to forty per cent of 
each year's ahens return home. There is also the counter- 
vailing stream of outward-bound tourists from America, 
who, as was said of English travelers in Beaconsfield's 
day, " raise the price of provisions for a thousand leagues 
of travel." The third-class passenger traveling westward 
is thus partly offset by the first-class passenger travel- 
ing eastward. 

This rhythmic flow is also the form of motion within 
the nation. There is the steady stream of migration 
westward, and the steady flow of the secure fortunes east- 
ward, and the same movement of students for the higher 
education. The quantitative tendency is westward, but 
the qualitative tendency, so far as economic position is 
concerned, is eastward. In the relations of the city and 
the country the same rhythm has begun. The country 
gives the finest and the worst elements of its population 
to the city, but within the last twenty years the Ameri- 
can city-dweller has awakened to the invitation of nature, 
and he seeks some rural estate that he can call his own. 
This rhythm goes on even in the limits of the city. It is 
going on in England, though not so fast as in America. 
The worker as he improves his position goes into the 
sweeter, cleaner air of the suburbs; the suburban who 
improves his position goes into the modish streets of the 
adjoining metropolis. In many places the suburban 
detached villa is giving way to the apartment house whose 
population is almost inaccessible to the institutional life 
of the locality; but there are cases where this difficult 
population moves out again to the privacy of a detached 
house, and the freedom that can be found in the suburbs. 



164 The Temper of the American People 

All this differs from the older movements of population. 
In the old invasions there was no return; the nation or 
loose agglomeration of tribes moved to stay. 

The modern motion of population is also economic and 
not military. Of course all the older invasions, even the 
sentimental ones of the Crusades, were economic at the 
bottom; but they were in the military form. They are 
now in the economic form. The reason why the immi- 
grants come is an economic one: a few have a mystic 
ideal of liberty, as a certain serving-maid, who remarked 
over and over again that the steward on the steamer 
that brought her to America told her dozens of times 
that she was "coming to a free country"; but what free- 
dom meant to her she could not explain. A few immi- 
grants have suffered real oppression; but most of them 
have felt that life was economically better in America, 
and so they have come. The idealization of liberty in 
the minds of the immigrants has been overworked, just 
as it has been overstated in the description of the Amer- 
ican himself. Both wish the same thing, — to be let 
alone, — to be allowed to get a living, or money, undis- 
turbed by exacting regulations; and it is fair to say that 
both get what they want in this prehminary stage of the 
game of life. In America, government touches the people 
less directly than in other countries, since taxation is 
largely indirect, and there are few petty regulations of 
civic conduct. 

These motions, furthermore, are invited and not man- 
datory. The steamship companies solicit immigrants, 
and the railroads invite them in rhetorical terms that 
would apply to a land of promise, to build up the country 
along the lines they own. These also have special depart- 
ments for negotiating with manufacturers the building of 
factories on the edge of their property. Private owners 



Element of Change in American Life 165 

imitate the railroads and put up a sign, "Factory site 
free." Cities and towns do the same thing. Village 
improvement societies keep their localities before a large 
public, and invite it in to fill up the long streets not yet 
settled, and costly to keep up. Hotels boom villages. 
And churches tacitly enlist in the work. 

The motions of American life are also individual. In 
the older styles of life men had to move if the tribe or 
nation moved whether they wished to do so or not; but 
now the tribe stays while the individual moves. It is 
this that makes movement so impressive today, for there 
are so many stationary persons who observe it, or are 
affected by it. A man hidden in the heart of a racial 
trek would hardly know that he moved. All the old 
familiar faces would still smile upon him, the old cries 
would be in his ear, the tasks would continue the same. 
But the modern movement, since it is only partial, marks 
both the mover, and the unmoved who is conscious of 
the other's motions. 

Above all, the new movement is educational since it 
tends to develop impressionability. In the older move- 
ments the conquered had to accept something from the 
conquerors, but the conquerors also had to accept some- 
thing from the conquered. Rome did this in Eastern lux- 
ury, to her own undoing. But this acceptance on both 
sides was slow and bitter, as in the Norman conquest 
of England. Today, however, acceptance is a presup- 
position before the immigrant moves. He not only 
intends to save friction by living in the style of the 
country he goes to, he wishes to do so, because for the 
moment that is his very ideal of life, — the very goal he 
is seeking. 

In other words, using the term rather spaciously, the 
fluidity of American life is a cultural movement. It is 



166 The Temper of the American People 

obviously so in the case of the students who go away to 
school, or to college, choosing not often the college at the 
door, but one far away, in order to come into relation 
with a different life from the one well known at home. 
But the movement is quite as cultural for the man who 
moves away to "better himself." He is likely indeed to 
be a better man for his migrations, as foregoing pages 
have suggested; for he must exert himself in new ways, 
be molded by new disciplines, frame his idea of better- 
ment in newer and nobler terms. 



in 

We now consider some of the emotions of American life 
due to these movements, and first the feehngs due to 
immigration. 

Some of the immigrants who come hither, come with 
fixed ideas that prevent them from being absorbed finally 
in the national life. Many Italians come only to return 
to the land that has exerted a spell upon other peoples 
through all history. But among the immigrants who 
come to stay, the prevailing feeling is not one of absolute 
satisfaction. At the best, everywhere, the proportion of 
success is not so large as that of failure; and though fail- 
ure in American life may be an incomparably better thing 
than the situation left behind in the old life, it does not 
take any man long to judge his position from the stand- 
ards of his actual environment rather than from those of 
recollection. 

The first feeling of the alien is often one of disillusion. 
The man has left all his outer skin of habits and tradi- 
tions behind him. He is more sensitive than a flayed 
Marsyas, as his attempts at mimicry of his surroundings 
plainly show. He discovers that money is hard to earn 



Element of Change in American Life 167 

even in America, and as he is mostly unskilled he finds 
employment more fluctuating than he did at home. If 
he has a little money and settles on the land, he still has 
to go to the lonely outposts of the nation, or the deserted 
localities in older states, whereas his former mode of life 
was one of contact with his fellows in some village or 
town. Above all there is the unapproachable and intan- 
gible society that always keeps him from its heart. What 
he touches is the crudest part of the life about him, 
uneducated, vulgar, domineering, tainted by vices due to 
himself at the second generation, before education has 
broadened the alien strains by culture. He sees his 
children travel away from him, as all parents do, only in 
his case the bifurcation is emphasized into an emotional 
agony. 

This, of course, leads to loneliness. There are more 
lonely people in the United States than in any population 
of equal size in European lands. The very nature of the 
case implies it. And the whole structure of American 
society is an attempt to escape from this loneliness by 
machinery. If the immigrant settles on a farm, he may 
chance to settle near neighbors who came with him; but 
this only means that he will not be in contact with the 
national life, and all its evidences about the larger circum- 
ference of his neighborhood will be foreign, and even 
meaningless, to him. If he settles in an American com- 
munity he is let alone, except when he is needed in eco- 
nomic relations. If he remains in a city, working in its 
industries, or digging its sewers and doing the rougher 
work, he has his own quarter, and is an estate within a 
state, separated as much or more from American life as 
though he were in Italy. For in Italy he is part of the 
historic background, and the traveler looks on him as a 
proper human accessory; but in America he is only an 



168 The Temper of the American People 

industrial instrument. The great emotion of this class 
is longing, loneliness, perhaps even a sharper pain. 

Many an immigrant feels that perhaps it would have 
been better for him if he had never been born into the 
liberty of the Western world. He naturally has elegiac 
fancies that weave their spell over the early years of life, 
and every man forgets past tyrannies in the presence of 
others nearer to him; but still he cries: "I do not get 
out of life what I used to get at home." And yet the 
immigrant is loyal to America. This loyalty is, how- 
ever, prospective: he feels that for his children who were 
born here, or came young enough to enter American life 
at the start, the road lies toward the rising sun. He 
watches them among their fellows, and proudly looks to the 
time when they will take their place in the main avenues 
of American life. Sometimes, alas, even here, he receives 
his death-blow, as by degrees his children show signs of 
humiliation that they are his children. A New York 
banker, for example, of Hebrew extraction, who was 
convicted of fraud, swore in court that he did not know 
his father and mother, who by unmistakable proof were 
facing him. This is an extreme illustration, no doubt, 
but the immigrant too often experiences the misery of 
knowing that in the career of his children he is looked on 
as a necessary evil and hindrance. 

All this leads to a feeling of confusion in the mind of 
the immigrant. Confusion, both intellectual and sympa- 
thetic, is the prevalent emotional state of these great 
classes of men. The immigrant has not found his ideal 
come true; but with the incorrigible hope of man, he 
trusts it may come true for his children. In any case he 
cannot retrace his steps, but he cannot find joy where 
he is, so he hopes for it in the next generation. And thus 
the immigrant continues his long novitiate of sacrifice. 



Element of Change in American Life 169 

The immigrant is not alone, however, in these confused 
feeUngs. The society he comes into has some misgivings 
about him, and some qualms that indicate social indi- 
gestion. 

America questions whether it can preserve the old 
ideals with so large an alien population. The immigrant 
gives trouble economically, he is a perplexity socially, 
and religiously he is almost inaccessible. If he develops 
the country, it is a different country for his coming. He 
changes the emotional climate. The principles of the 
Founders seem inoperative in his closed regions of life. 
It may chance that having invited these different races 
to develop the country materially, there may be no ideal 
country left. Every one feels doubtful about the matter. 
All sorts of men are working upon the problem, but so 
far with much uncertainty as to conclusions, except that 
the problem itself can hardly be overstated in respect 
to its seriousness. 

At the end, therefore, American society is confused by 
the immigrant, as the immigrant is confused by America. 
He has been for some time a "problem" for America; 
and America so far does not see its way through the 
situation. Like individuals, society often chooses to 
ignore a problem that seems insoluble, and this, perhaps, 
accounts for the social coolness of Americans towards 
immigrants. They will deal with the problem, so to 
speak, in working hours, through social agencies, gov- 
ernment guardianship, and so forth; but in hours 
of social ease the problem is put by till the harness 
of everyday life is taken on again. But it is precisely 
in the social region that the matter is to be settled if 
at all. The safeguard of the republic is for each citizen 
to "get close" to one who is not yet a good citizen, 
and by personal relations allow another man to get 



170 The Temper of the American People 

sight of the American's soul and of his ideals for his 
country. 

IV 

In the case of those who are Americans, but migrants 
from one place to another, there are some feelings like 
those developed in the immigrant, though with hardly- 
such shipwrecking results. 

The migrant is lonely. This is the cry as one meets 
newcomers in any American community, even the best. 
The migrant may, and does, adopt one of two ways of 
meeting this. He may become reticent, self-contained, 
independent of the life of the place, and comfort himself 
that he only has to stay there for a brief apprenticeship, 
until his firm shall send him elsewhere: in short, he may 
bear it. Or he may step out to meet the community 
halfway. He may go to church, join some order, fre- 
quent political meetings, or, if nothing better, the grocery 
store, and so mix with the people enough to take off some 
of the angles and edges of individual life. It frequently 
happens that his roving has brought him in contact with 
someone, or some institution, known to his fellows, and 
this makes a slight bond at once. His religion, if he has 
any, brings him into connection with the church, and in 
many places this is the surest means of approach. 
By degrees the loneliness is forgotten, not because 
of final satisfactions, but through the many institu- 
tional relations established. The migrant soon gets 
"interested" in the place; he may and often does 
"boom" it to his friends. He enters heartily into the 
institutional work and becomes a loyal citizen of that 
particular community. He gives his money for the local 
enterprises, subscribing for play-grounds, concert courses, 
for salaries of ministers, for missions; he will build new 



Element of Change in American Life 171 

churches, and demand good schools. He is one with 
his kind. 

But all the time he is institutional, — hardly ever 
personal; this is where his loyalty lies. The American 
makes acquaintance easily, but is slower in forming 
friendships. He will meet a man for years in the institu- 
tion, and be his friend in a public way, and yet never see 
him in his own home or in any relation that verges toward 
the domestic or inner life. His patriotism shines clearly 
in these institutional relations, and it is localized in forms 
that no doubt make for good in the community; but it 
does not make for good to him ideally. He becomes a 
willing worker in so many societies that he can never be 
at home enough to develop the true heart of society around 
the domestic hearth. He spends money on institutional 
and public feasts where a single "plate" costs as much as 
would serve a dinner for six in his own home. Hence 
there ensues a certain shallowness, and indeed a flippancy, 
in the social mind, and also a parochial point of view. 
Social life thus becomes merely another instrument of 
utility. A feast is to boom something, and it is generally 
too big for personal contact, and it separates the sexes 
too often. A life loosely organized for conversation and 
the interchange of thought, where men and women meet 
freely in small companies, is too little known among the 
great middle classes of America. But it is there that 
friendships ripen, and that men may be known in 
worthiness. 

These feelings of the migrant are answered back by the 
earlier settlers of the place, who in turn went through the 
same process. These earlier migrants watch the new- 
comers with mingled interests ; some curiously, who take 
no further steps ; others, who have worked into the com- 
munity Institutions, look out for promising recruits who 



172 The Temper of the American People 

shall help to make the institutions better, or make the 
burden of carrying them Hghter by service or money. 
The newcomer, if willing, is soon set to work. It would 
take years in England to do institutionally what is done 
in months in America. The newcomer may even intro- 
duce new ways of working without offence; he may, nay 
is expected to, bring his experience to the service of the 
place. He may soon be a political force, a leading citi- 
zen, a social influence, "a power in the community." 

Yet, again, there is the defect of a lacking personal 
loyalty. Friends, in the truest sense, are rare anywhere; 
but everything is against them in a community built up 
in the fashion I have described. To have friends a man 
must be worthy of them, and this is a result of a noble 
discipline, as the Greeks well understood. Friendship is 
an art, and a mystery too; but in the foregoing institutions 
the individuals are so earnest about making the social 
machinery work, that they have not time to think of the 
spacious issues of life within. In other words, they are 
unable to cultivate the kind of life that would make them 
interesting for more than a casual meeting. A young 
woman graduate from one of these regions, for example, 
said that she never cared to live more than two years in 
one place, and, so far, she had lived according to her 
theory. What an irreverence to the realities of life within 
and without ! Here we get the new social illumination, — 
the appearance and not the reality of society, — a society 
stretched out, shaved thin, stripped bare! 

Is it any wonder that the prevalent feeling in the 
minds of thoughtful people in these communities is one- 
of social weariness.'* Whenever the social inquirer gets 
close enough to this kind of life, to ask some who live it 
about its worth, there is generally a deep scepticism in 
the answers. After so many instruments to catch social 



Element of Change in American Life 173 

happiness, it is not there! After working so hard at the 
trade of joy, to find that it hardly provides bread! And 
so the goods are packed some fine morning, and the migrant 
moves once more, this time to the place where he is sure 
he will find his soul satisfied. But, alas, he takes the 
same soul with him. 



There remains the last class of the moving popula- 
tion of America to consider, namely, the people who 
travel. 

The traveling American has come to usurp the place 
of the traveling Englishman, in the consciousness of 
Europeans. He is more liked but also more laughed at. 
He is not so serious a person as John Bull, not so impres- 
sive a personality, not so stupidly weighty. He is unre- 
served, emotional even, in certain aspects, frankly and 
youthfully himself. In one great class, somewhat dimin- 
ishing in numbers, or modified in spirit, he is emotionally 
flamboyant. In this species he does not go abroad to 
learn, but to teach. The Englishman carries England with 
him, darkly suspicious of any foreign custom, and requir- 
ing the nearest approach to his own life that can be at- 
tained in a foreign land; but he does not preach England. 
That is needless, because he solemnly lives it. It would 
be incomprehensible to him to suppose that his example, 
style of Ufe, accent, would not be enough without words, 
to show the majesty and worth of England, — and him- 
self. But the flamboyant American takes nothing for 
granted. Though he looks American, and speaks with 
an unmistakable intonation, he always tells the world 
who he is, where he came from, and others matter of im- 
portance to him. He never fails to glorify his country. 
If needful he will wear a flag on a holiday. 



174 The Temper of the American People 

All this is so childlike that the sympathetic observer 
enjoys for a moment coming into contact with so nn- 
sophisticated a creature. Still it is a great misfortune 
for any man to wrap himseK in his flag so tightlj', that 
he fails to walk freely into the life of the world lying 
invitingly before him. Hence the American often comes 
back to his country in a worse state than when he left 
it, for nothing came into his already intoxicated soul. 
WTiat he learned was nothing; what he did was every- 
thing; and if he could only say, in Sydney Smith's classic 
witticism that "he had done the Louvre in fifteen 
minutes," he would be happy forever. There are many 
Americans, both men and women, who have "done" 
Europe and show no signs of resulting cultivation. 

Next come those who travel in an institutional form. 
These may be people sent abroad by various organizations, 
or by private enterprise without any benevolence, as, for 
example, the forty young women conducted through 
Europe for six weeks, at the instance of a newspaper, 
which had a voting contest to determine the "most 
popular person" in the several occupations carried on 
by women. Teachers, shop-girls, typewriters, "society 
queens," all in one rout trooped over Europe, and were 
photographed in various cities, on historic backgrounds, 
in frivolous moments. They "had a good time." But 
other matters were mixed, and education was not greatly 
forwarded when one still thought that Christopher 
Columbus was buried in St. Paul's. Among these, of 
course, were one or two who really gained something, 
chiefly the intention to go abroad again, — and in another 
way. 

This traveling in mass is partly due to the great number 
of unattended women who go abroad, but even so it is 
enlarged to an extent that defeats the real end of cultiva- 



Element of Change in American Life 175 

tion; and it oftentimes weakens the results of worth for 
those who have a serious purpose. This is the defect of 
many of those who go abroad for pedagogic reasons, and 
embark with an exalted seriousness. They have prepared 
themselves by courses of reading; they may even take a 
lecturer with them so that they may be taught on the way. 
They are grouped so that no detail of learning can be 
missed through the inadvertence of a single person; they 
question, discuss, affirm; they schematize their knowl- 
edge and try it on the unwary; they spoil the soul of 
the ordinary uncommercial traveler who invites repose. 
These are the zealots of learning, — Spartans if you 
please, — who lay aside every weight in order to run the 
race. But in truth they miss the choicest goods. 

These are some of the comedies of American life, and 
perhaps it needs them, for it is immensely serious on the 
whole. But there are sensible and fine-grained people in 
America who travel a great deal, and always with some 
result in elevation of personality. These may be met in 
the ranks of students who still carry on the traditions of 
a " grand tour." Though many of the university men who 
go abroad come back with smaller horizons than one would 
expect, there are many also who return with final posses- 
sions. The American of this type understands the people 
he meets far better than the Englishman. His essential 
democracy makes him wish to know what the others are 
thinking. He outnumbers the Europeans who travel to 
know and to feel. He comes back with finer manners, 
and elevated thoughts that disturb him with joy, and he 
unconsciously influences American fife for the best. 

Fine spirits like these are to be found in all the com- 
petent ranks of American life. One may be the minister 
of a church in a manufacturing town in New England, 
whose day's work is made up of details of management. 



176 The Temper of the American People 

and of personal sacrifice, the long season through. The 
casual acquaintance might spend a working day with him 
and never suspect the color of the life of his soul; but 
every year, the moment he can get away, he loafs through 
Wales or Brittany, with the Arthurian legends or the 
"Roman de la Rose" in his pocket. Another may be a 
high-bred woman who has hved in Paris, in Rome, in 
Vienna, until she needs not to boast herself cosmopohte, 
for it is evident at the first glance. Yet she has not lost 
her love for America; she sees its sohd truth, its heroic 
manhood, though it lacks the beauty of the countries 
"fatigued," as Mme. de Stael said, "with glory." 

The influence on American hfe of this stream of trav- 
elers to Eiu"ope is not yet as great as one would suppose. 
The observer would expect social revolutions to follow in 
many a town and suburb, as the new styles of life are 
expounded by the returning traveler. But Hfe goes on 
much the same because the pressiu-e of its material in- 
terests is so great, and these are predominantly com- 
mercial and industrial. There is always the initial diffi- 
culty in the way of cultivation due to the fact that the 
preponderant aims of American life are active and not at 
all aesthetic. The traveler who takes his travels in the 
most liberal way is thought of as the professor is thought 
of, — as a little out of the beaten track of life. If a man 
goes abroad on business he is imderstood; or if he goes 
to rest so that he may be more competent in the struggle 
for business, he is understood; but to go for no tangible 
practical pm-pose, not even to study, is a little hard for 
the American to understand. For the American is apt 
to work on his own soul much as he works on the unde- 
veloped resources of his coimtry, with a serious earnest- 
ness that seeks "results." 

Still there are results from this stream of travel. One 



Element of Change in American Life 177 

is imitation. More people each year go abroad, urged 
tliither by tlie example of those who have aheady gone. 
The incitements are all about them. They read notices 
in the local paper that their neighbors sail on a specified 
steamer; they see trunks at little wayside stations with the 
labels of European hotels upon them. They meet people 
who keep alive their recollections of travel through mem- 
bership in a club of the people with whom they made the 
journey. They hsten to "talks" at private houses, or in 
church vestries, or other places, given by their neighbors, 
that present the more notable events of the trip, illustrated 
by lantern slides and ludicrous episodes. At the lowest 
they see moving pictures of the life of foreign capitals; 
at the highest they hear some professor describe the 
genius of the nation he has studied. All this tends to keep 
the mind open. Nowhere in the world is the general 
population so well informed about the outer styles of 
foreign life, — even the most distant East, — as in 
America. 

The other result duo to American travel is a general 
interest in European problems of life. The American is 
endowed with a great curiosity, and when this has been 
made effective by travel, he takes an unusual interest in 
foreign life. If he has studied abroad he keeps abreast of 
Continental movements, and often interprets them more 
fairly than the men on the ground, because he is out of 
the dust and can see clearly. The business man, sick of 
his own daily round, breathes more nobly as he faces 
monuments of a time far beyond the beginnings of his own 
national life. The more frivolous, even, have some 
interest in Europe, as they remember the American 
women who have married into European nobility and they 
read of them playing the game of courts with power and 
grace. Even the seriously religious people take some 



178 The Temper of the American People 

interest in European standards of life, as they run across 
them exemplified in colonial government of heathen races, 
of which some members are the subjects of their own 
missionary and philanthropic care. These may go 
abroad as far as the East, for a holiday tempered with 
philanthropy, seeking out the results of missionary enter- 
prise, and they may come back again with decided knowl- 
edge and opinions as to relative standards of national 
life. 

All this leads to tolerance, and tolerance is a part of 
American character, as the old welcome to the immigrant 
is, or the diplomatic demand for fair play in the East. 
Tolerance is the great result of the American fluidity of 
life. In the new conditions developed on the Western 
continent, it is the indispensable thing. This is what has 
made something of the strength of America; it is also a 
source of some of its weakness. Just as the incoming 
millions of men have made America a melting-pot, with 
fierce passions almost spilling over; so the easy acceptance 
of many diverse things has led to a mental ferment that 
prevents a sober mind from doing the needed critical 
work. The bad is often taken with the good. The 
optimism is too much that of the third bottle, when the 
rosy flush is mounting that presages oblivion rather than 
the dawn. 

By means of travel, and the importation within her own 
border of strange types of life, America has the materials 
of social judgment in excess of any European nation, and 
more widely spread among all classes, and she now needs 
to clarify her thinking and become critical unto salvation. 
With her immense pedagogic interest this ought to come 
in time. She feels this dimly herseK; for she is engaged 
in a continual discussion of her own national life, in which 
her very awkwardness indicates that she is awakening to 



Element of Change in American Life 179 

self-consciousness. The goal before her is the develop- 
ment of individual and national character in the midst of 
extreme and fluid conditions. She is to find and keep the 
eternal values, in a social organization more changing than 
civilized history has known before. 



CHAPTER IX 

TEE SENTIMENTS OF AMERICAN SOCIETY 



WHEN the stranger first touches the hfe of America, 
the social areas appear undifferentiated, and the 
structure of society almost invertebrate, so rapidly does 
the newcomer get taken into some social connection or 
other. But a longer acquaintance makes increasingly 
clear the underlying characteristics of civiUzation, which 
demand that the tools shall only be given to him who can 
handle them, and the fairest empire of mmd and heart 
shall only be won by those who have the conquering powers 
of learning, wit, chivalry, and beauty. 

Taking account of the fact that there is no traditional 
aristocracy, divided from the common life by history, or 
by opulence in manners and possessions, America still 
has regions of life as difficult of access to the ordinary man 
as the regions of European aristocracy. The word "Brah- 
min " is often used to describe these areas, which, by the 
way, are not regions of lavish splendor, but rather fields 
where several generations have occupied the ground, 
possibly dating from the intellectual or social settlement of 
the particular locality. Here are traditions, — memories 
of the earliest times, when men were ranked in social 
precedence in church, — ideals, and a calm but none the 
less fixed determination to keep out the intrusive elements 
of life, — the newly rich, and the politicians; the one be- 
cause of lack of finer feelings; the other for the added 
reason that society would only be used for pohtical ends. 



The Sentiments of American Society 181 

The newly rich find it as difficult to get into society at 
the best, in America, as they find it to achieve the same 
purpose in England. On the whole I think they find it 
harder. For the society that is most aristocratic in Eng- 
land is not necessarily the most intellectual; but it is 
the most intellectual in America. Long before the ex- 
clusive hostesses in London dared to ask professional men 
to their tables, the professional men in America were 
setting the intellectual pace in what society there was in 
their own country. And this urged on the intellectual 
finesse of American women, so that in the best representa- 
tives they have become a type hard to match in the Old 
World. Riches are too common in America to make a 
reason for entrance into the best society. The finest 
efflorescence of American society, however, is limited to a 
few of the oldest communities. 

As to the politicians they generally represent the poorer 
elements in the intellect and the society of the national 
life. Of course there are exceptions. But the highest 
political body is far less intellectual than the House of 
Commons if one considers the more liberal side of the life 
of the mind. The State legislatures would not compare 
at all wath English to\\Ti-councils, — at least where popu- 
lation is congested, or where it is more than usually sparse. 
American municipal government could not be likened to 
anything in English political life. The politicans appear 
to be in society; their names are in the papers; they go 
everywhere, and are in everything, — except the attrac- 
tive country of romance governed by the real arbiters of 
social means. 

II 

In a certain sense, American society, beginning with 
the broader life of the West, or the larger areas of indus- 



182 The Temper of the American People 

trial life, is undifferentiated. In the novel of locality, 
with the West as a background, as in Mr. Wister's "The 
Virginian," society is about as undifferentiated as it can 
be. Cowboys and settlers join promiscuously in social 
gatherings, whose dances are open to the whole com- 
munity. Yet even here there are the beginnings of differ- 
ence. A judge represents the law; a bishop, who is a 
clerical Rough Rider, represents the church; and a school- 
teacher represents education and refinement; and all 
these people become the natural leaders of the com- 
munity. The educated man begins the social hierarchy 
even in the estimation of the most unintelligent areas, for 
undifferentiated America worships brains much more 
than money. In the industrial regions the same rule holds 
good. The teacher gains the respect and loyalty of the 
immigrant whose child is being made into a good citizen 
by her daily ministrations. If a man in humble station 
can send his son to college, he has already gained some 
social eminence. Out of the milhons of undifferentiated 
people of the earlier West, thousands of young men and 
women emerged into the educational life of the country, 
and set standards of life and hope unknown before to their 
native environment. 

In the centers of distribution the differences become a 
little more marked. There are the teachers, professional 
men, larger traders, small bankers, who have gained 
something of a fixed position, who tend to associate so far 
as busy lives allow. But here is another difference due to 
the church. WTiile the church looks after the newcomer 
and tries to put him into connection with his new range of 
life, it is divided by ritual, creed, — and what really counts 
more, — temperament. It thus happens that all the 
"best people" go to one church, and all the rest to the 
others. The word "aristocratic" is used in America 



The Sentiments of American Society 183 

surprisingly often, — and nearly always in connection with 
a given church. This division of the spoils of population 
accentuates the social cleavage; for the church determines 
the social life in many communities. 

In the greater cities the same segregation goes on, and 
it is made more evident by the geographical distance be- 
tween the mass of the population and the better off who 
live in the residential districts. Here again society is 
institutional, organized into clubs, philanthropies, and 
churches, with functions that are partly social, and 
partly interested, — with an end to gain and an axe to 
grind. Here also change comes in with greater force. 
In the smaller places the change is generally inward; 
but in manufacturing cities it is outward too; and this 
adds to the dijQBculty of framing a worthy society. 

The metropolis, of course, has greater differences still. 
There is the vast substratum of labor, congested, im- 
pervious, looking blankly at the spectacle of wealth, 
sometimes, alas, with hate; difficult to approach because 
of suspicion; lacking common interests with any other 
class, blindly loyal to its own, ready for martyrdom if 
need be, because it only knows its own tyrannical needs. 
In other ranges of life, save the Brahmin range, there is 
no class consciousness; but in labor there is; for labor has 
never penetrated other life to know it sympathetically. 
The intermediate range has penetrated labor, and by con- 
nections, and reading, has penetrated the upper range 
enough to sympathize. But labor has had neither the 
means nor the desire to know the largest circumferences 
of life, and has had to depend on others to interpret its 
own still sad music, and its deeper agonies. The press 
rebukes class legislation, class consciousness, in the interest 
of what it deems a true democracy; but the only region 
where class consciousness is solid is the labor region, and 



184 The Temper of ihc American People 

the only class legislation consciously enacted is labor legis- 
lation. The trusts and corporations fear each other too 
much. In this sense the workingmen have been called 
*'the p^i^"ileged classes." 

The suburban region we haye already considered, and for 
our present descriptive purpose we may dismiss it as the 
counterpart of the residential region in the larger manu- 
facturing towns, with the same kind of organization, but 
also with less security socially, because unsettled by the 
standards of the contiguous metropolis. 

And here a new factor enters into our consideration, 
namely, the population of the metropolitan streets formerly 
socially important, but now degenerating into lodging- 
house communities, with Bohemia in \*iew. This chang- 
ing debatable land has no society save that of the public 
places. It is a dangerous region to touch. It has its 
own codes of morality or immorality, its own brilliance 
heightened to glare, its paint and jewelry, its haK-world 
that never arrives at the full-orbed life of society, and a 
pathetic remnant of those who once arrived but are now 
no longer successful. Here are the students, "struggling" 
artists in pamt, marble or music, bank clerks, tj'pewriters, 
insurance sohcitors, retiring spinsters, broken fortunes, 
and broken characters. Once the field might have been 
the scene of an Autocrat at the Breakfast Table; but now 
it is the scene of respectable poverty, bizarre prodigality, 
of shattered hopes, and hopes ever springing up to recre- 
ate life out of unlovely materials. Into this region there 
also flows a steady stream of Hebrews who have gained 
a foothold in life, whose women dress too elaborately, and 
glisten with jewels, and walk the streets to and from the 
play as mincingly as their own prophet described them 
ages ago. These have now conquered the land, and they 
take their ease in the country they have won. 



The Sentiments of American Society 185 

At the very top of the scale there are the few streets 
known all over the country, representing the Brahminical 
life of the various capitals, whither the wealthy and suc- 
cessful have gravitated, to add to the number of an 
elect population. Fifth Avenue, New York, is typical; 
though there is an element of more stoic grace in the 
similar iocahties of Boston, Baltimore, and perhaps 
Philadelphia. 

Here in midwinter many houses are closed, because the 
families are abroad, and in summer the streets are deserts 
for the same reason; but in the brief season there is an ad- 
mirable society, that always has elements of unexpected- 
ness in it, since its connections are so wide. A family may 
have "interests" in Texas, or Wyoming, or California, so 
that the life of a simpler area is known to its members as 
well as the life of their own generous region. The scions of 
the family are graduates of the university, as well as quite 
competent business men, and they may perchance be 
athletes with a college record. The women know Europe 
intimately; often, indeed, their friends are married into 
the nobility of the various capitals. These are the true 
internationals, whose success on a wider field has been the 
unjust theme of many a scandalous newspaper paragraph, 
whose beauty and brains have been put at the service of 
other national life through the channels of human relation 
and affection. Before such women the European must 
stand in respectful salute; they embody beauty, grace, 
intellect, — and ideals. And the American, if liberally 
instructed, must also see in them apostles of his own 
civilization at its best. 

It is an anti-climax to say a word here, though it still 
needs to be said, about the other society that appears in 
the papers, made up of languid and enervated rich, who 
employ their time in doing some new thing, inventing a 



186 The Temper of the American People 

soup, or decorating a banqueting-room more expensively 
than was ever done before. Some allowance must be 
made for the penny-a-liners with a fatal facility for un- 
truth, happily hit off by Mr. George Bernard Shaw in 
*'The Doctor's Dilemma," who rejoice in these exploits; 
but the records of the divorce court, though the statistics 
need careful measuring by the moral laws, give unimpeach- 
able evidence that naughtiness is endemic in the human 
race. Socially, the larger part of the Americans are yet 
children, and they do things in an unsophisticated way, 
including the forbidden things.' But a fair-minded critic 
can say to European society that it is not perfect enough 
to be permitted to cast the first stone. 



Ill 

The purposes of society in any country are often hidden 
by the instruments or modes through which society tries 
to realize them. To many a casual observer it would 
seem almost as incredible that society should have a serious 
purpose, as that he himself should have a soul. Yet we 
have been told, on good authority, that a soul is necessary 
to save the expense of salt. Society likewise, in truth, 
has some serious purposes, or else its elaborate history 
belies its origin and end. 

One of these purposes is amusement, which in itself is 
serious matter enough to be the stuflf of philosophical 
criticism, in the departments of drama and the fine arts. 
It also lends itself to the most elaborate organization. 
This, perhaps, would be the foreign critic's first judgment, 
that social life in America is over-elaborate, too marked, 
too organized, and too little personal, all the way from 
Suburbia to the meridian of the metropolis. The result 
is that amusement becomes a serious drain on the nervous 



The Sentiments of American Society 187 

energy, for it grows into contests that do not stop short 
of complete victory over the opposed interest or person. 
The American, looking over his social continent, sees it as 
undeveloped as the physical area, and he forthwith or- 
ganizes his society in the same way that he organizes his 
instruments for subduing the earth. He has money, and 
is thus able to secure the best there is of whatever is pro- 
curable; but the intangible tilings, that are the real best, 
he often fails to attain. He can build an opera house, very 
commodious and in good taste, or a New Theatre in 
which to set a finer style of drama than the syndicated 
managers permit; yet, somehow, the thing does not 
work as he expected. He is in too great a hurry; he 
has too much money; he has too little history; he is too 
direct. 

Society is a form of organization with a longer history 
than any contemporary political form, and one much 
longer than the industrial organization of any modern 
state. It has its fineness, traditions, manners, an accent 
that takes several generations to attain, a wit that is 
sublimated by time. And this the American forgets. 
European society has been cut off by the "abhorred shears 
of fate" in revolutions, from the society painted by Van- 
dyke or Watteau; but it has not been cut off in memory. 
And it is precisely the delicate shades, fluctuating 
memories, hesitating and intrusive histories, and alto- 
gether charming duplicities, that make a large part of the 
fairyland that society always tries to be. The machinery 
in America may be no greater than in Europe, but it does 
not work automatically; it creaks more, "gives itself 
away more," shows itself more by advertisement of its 
functions, costs, and occasions. It certainly takes more 
obvious management. 

This is particularly true of the outdoor life of the people. 



188 The Temper of the American People 

Three great phases of outdoor are Ufe being worked out, 
of which one is the game. This is largely a mass-play, 
administered by the athletic associations of colleges, or 
by professional teams, portentously costly, carried on by 
specially picked men. For outdoor sports are not common 
among the people as a whole, except as they are spectators. 
Men will go to game after game, who never play at any- 
thing themselves, and whose sedentary watching of other 
people's play is a distinct e\'il to them. This apphes to 
rich and poor alike, though the better off diminish the 
inactivity by a growing practice of golf. Another 
phase of the outdoor life of the people is found iu 
the country club now set on the borders of most 
towns of any size, where games can be played and 
guests in\'ited, which on the one hand makes a fine 
diversion for the guests, but on the other prevents the 
intimacy that hospitaUty develops when it centers in 
the home. The third phase is motoring, which by its 
very nature tends to take away real sociabiUty, because 
of rapid change, short stops at inns, and silence on the 
road. 

As the observer tries to sum up the outstanding things 
in the outdoor life of America that are most national, 
and indicative of a tendency to make this side of amuse- 
ment more satisfactory', he would consider most interest- 
ing the development of a feeling for nature ia large numbers 
of the people. Many have a real love for fine scenery, 
and many also have an instinct for the prime emotions 
resulting from contact with the wildest powers and 
phenomena of natural life. Even the class just emerg- 
ing from the lowest industrial ranks tries to have a 
week or two in a camp by the side of a mountain stream 
or lake. And this is far better than a week or two at 
Blackpool. 



The Sentiments of American Society 189 

IV 

From outdoor life we now step within the narrow space 
of walls, that through imagination, if art serves it well, 
open out again to the verge and confines of the universal 
frame. 

The theater has many phases in America, few of which 
are reaUv worthy. At the lowest scale there are the 
moving-picture shows, that draw immense crowds from 
the congested city districts, and from the illiterate and the 
foreign-born; for they need no interpreter, appealing, as 
they do, to the eye directly. At first they were too httle 
moral, and too apt to turn on the exploits of criminals 
more or less in earnest; but they are now improving, and 
are often made really educational. So interesting are they 
to the masses, that even during strike conditions they 
are able to keep their doors open, and make a hving for 
their owners. 

Nert there are the vaudeville shows, some of them 
reasonably clean, though a Httle inane, careful of a few of 
the proprieties, particularly those that hinge on race 
depreciation- Others appeal to the sense of beauty, or 
to sense alone without the beauty; but even in the poorer 
examples there may happen to be an interruption in the 
inanity by the insertion of one good thing in the pro- 
gram. On this level also there are the places where melo- 
drama holds sovereign sway, and teaches heavy morals 
to a class that is not likely to get morals in any other way, 
or at least not taught so directly. Here virtue keeps 
unspotted from the world after many hairbreadth escapes, 
and here crime Ls punished with more than poetic justice. 
And here is a fortune for the modem dramatic artist, 
"the world's greatest manufacturer of melodramas," 
lately eulogized in some of the pubUc prints. 



190 The Temper of the American People 

The "legitimate drama" is in about the same situa- 
tion that it is in England. Its state is " very low," though 
not in the sense implied in Goldsmith's ironic rejoinder. 
Stock companies have to give way to visiting stars, who 
are not always too careful of the setting where their light 
shines. In these cases personality is played to the 
utmost, without regard to the general unity of effect. 
The recent traditions, — and the theater, like the col- 
lege, makes traditions faster than any other region of life, 
because of its rapidly succeeding generations, — are all 
against the stock company today, and the profits are too. 
Indeed it is more than possible that the profits determine 
the traditions. If the ideal stock company that Mr. 
Edward Gordon Craig so eloquently recommends is far 
from realization in England, it is still further off in America, 
where every actor is determined if possible to strut upon 
the stage as a bright particular star. But, even so, the 
stars are not numerous after all, and the real successes 
especially among the women, are apt to be importations, 
and from the Continent. A venture in the right direction, 
but in the dark, was made in the New Theatre of New 
York at great cost. The lack of success was said to be 
due to excessive spending of money, an inability to wait 
for results, and the falling back upon companies of stars 
for certain plays, which ruined the possibility of unity, 
and obscured the vital conception of a permanent school 
of high and serious art. 

As in England, musical comedy leads all the rest; for 
weary men and women, tired by business or pleasure, go 
thither in shoals, seats selling weeks in advance, and 
plays running for a hundred nights or more. Meanwhile 
one does not go expecting art, or music, unless one is 
extremely innocent. 

The American opera has become a "galaxy of contiguous 



The Sentiments of American Society 191 

glory." For America is rich enough to pay for the best 
there is in this exquisite field. Hence the opera is most 
expensive, most brilliant in its clustered groups of singers, 
and most elaborate in details. Cities of the second rank 
desire to equal those of the first rank. Boston hears the 
singers that delight New York, — all of them, — largely 
in the same combinations and in the same works. It is 
not the fault of occasion, if Americans in a few of the 
Eastern cities do not know the great names thoroughly 
well. But the rest of America is practically a desert. 
The distances are too great to allow of side visits away 
from the greatest centers; and the cities are not big enough 
or wise enough to build up an indigenous theater, German 
fashion, that would win the interest and support, as well 
as develop the pride of the local citizens. 

Here, as elsewhere, America is at present inexperienced. 
It does not trust its own judgment. It imitates what has 
already been done in its own leading cities, when this 
might be the very worst thing for the city so loyal in its 
imitation. It is the same in respect to the judgment of 
the virtuosos in the musical art. With a reputable list 
of native feminine successes in grand opera, it yet awaits 
the verdict of Europe before awarding the palm to any of 
its own daughters. Then it is proud, indulgent, clamant 
even; but not before. 



Another great field of amusement is the one where 
human beings attempt to come into relation with each 
other by conversation, — to look, as it were, into each 
other's souls, and to feel their own more vitally as they 
try to expound them. 

On this side of life the Americans have exceptional 
advantages. They have been trained by several centuries 



192 The Temper of the American People 

of persistent discussion, until they have the elements of 
the art in perfection; and by reason of vast labors, and 
unexpected calls on their activity, they have plenty of 
matter for conversation. Even where they are compara- 
tively speechless, there is a fundamental apprehension of 
the great forces of nature, that shows itself in the humbler 
people by quaint bits of fragmentary philosophy. Ameri- 
can humor of the cross-roads type is one illustration; 
the proverbial philosophy of the Franklin order is another. 
In the smaller places, a life similar to that described in 
"Mansfield Park," cambric, scented, and limited, is in- 
conceivable, as is the conversation of Miss Austen's 
admirable characters. America is too epic in its labors, 
the "big bow-wow" style is more appropriate, and with a 
sure instinct, American life translates the large labors and 
incomprehensible experiences of common life into the 
parable, humor, and the anecdote. It also seeks to 
embody its wisdom in the same form for convenience. 
It is not analytic, but idealistic, — nay, even poetic, 
though as yet time has been too brief to give the poetic 
glamor of mistiness to the view. 

There is the country store where the art of society, by 
means of conversation, has its crudest beginning. The 
Englishman does not think of a shop as a place of com- 
panionship, of debate, of community irony, of social 
manners. But in many localities in America this is the 
place that becomes a forum, where little senates applaud 
or condemn, where rival theories struggle for survival, 
and local celebrities gain the first start in public life, 
learning skill, self-control, and the exposed secrets of 
human nature. There is much that is not good in so rude 
a meeting, but there is much that is disciplinary. Many 
a youth has heard the names of the national leaders men- 
tioned there for the first time, and he has been stirred to 



The Sentiments of American Society 193 

emulation. He has heard the preacher's sermon dis- 
cussed, and the crops, and poHtics; and as he Hstened he 
has been furnished for Hfe with the half-witless yet sug- 
gestive sayings that border on revelation, — such as Jane 
Welsh Carlyle delighted to remember, and her husband 
found perennially illuminating. 

Next comes the organized club of the small college, 
where the topics of the day, or those of interest to the 
particular constituency of the college are presented and 
discussed. The "literary societies," the "Greek letter 
societies," with their youthful egotism and immaturity, 
working itself off in talk, while far from the dignity of the 
classic societies In the oldest English universities, and 
especially the famous company of "the Apostles," yet 
give a good account of themselves. So do the high school 
debates organized for the same reason, — the desire for 
expression. The American youth is much less mature 
than his English fellow in the ability to look after himself; 
but he is much more mature in the arts of expression, at 
least verbally. He does it with more "form," more 
obvious logic, more with an eye to "results." 

Thus we reach the men's organizations for conversation, 
found in neighborhood clubs, church societies, professional 
relations, or business activities. Almost every interest 
has a club, almost everybody belongs to one or more. 
Chambers of Commerce dine together statedly and listen 
to speakers and ask questions. The community clubs 
import speakers and question them; or use their own 
"talent" and develop it in the using. These discussions 
are apt to be non-literary; for most of the speakers are 
experts, who tell what they know or what they have done. 
The old Lyceum is yet surviving in a modified degree, 
and there are men who get a large hearing, because they 
have made some reputation. But more and more the 



194 The Temper of the American People 

speaking is by men who, if not unacquainted with htera- 
ure, are at least not devotees of it; but instead are fol- 
lowers of the strenuous life. Several times in a winter, 
in a company of thirty or so, one may meet a man who has 
been connected with some world-wide interest. One may 
have been to the North Pole, another nearly there, an- 
other have said that he was there; one may have cleared 
up Havana; another administered rehef at Messina; 
another traveled tlirough Africa. The themes are end- 
less; and the speakers are generally men who have real 
worth. The observer is astonished at the varied interests 
of Americans, and at the way they manage to touch hfe 
in manifold places and forms. They seem to have a 
genius for being where an\'thing is happening, and lending 
a steadying hand. -\nd though they frankly describe 
how they bore themselves in the event, it is not often 
offensive, for they speak as to men who would do the 
same thing m the same place. 

The women's clubs follow the same procedure, only in 
stUl more organized fashion, and with more encyclopaedic 
interests. They seem determined to prove that they 
have the capacities of men; and like all neophites they are 
often betrayed into overdoing the matter. On the whole, 
their interests are more literary than those of the men. 
Their speakers are at once better and worse, — better 
because more Hterary, — worse because sometimes chosen 
with less discrimination from the large number of those 
who hang on the purlieus of art and cultivation. There 
is less discussion here than in the men's clubs, and far less 
direct challenge of ojiiuion. The members "take a part" 
inexorably, and in the case of the unfit there naturally 
results some boredom. These women's institutions, while 
partly social, are too rigidly organized, and too set upon 
results in uuprovemcnt and philanthropy, to be as effect- 



The Sentiments of American Society 195 

ive as they might be in real cultivation. They are also 
too large to afford the best results in human contacts. 

Besides the clubs there is the table as the institution of 
social life, and tlie magnet about which men and women 
gather for conversation. This is the consummation of 
civilization, despite the groans of those who have many 
undigested dinners to remember. It is bound to be this 
because men meet women there. Always in the case of 
clubs there is a little aridity because the sexes are sepa- 
rated. The men's clubs become too limited to practical 
interests; the women's clubs too reformatory, or at least 
too sensible of a mission. But at dinners all mortals find 
their place, and their neighbors. Of course there are dull 
dinners and they greatly prevail; but they are worth 
risking for the foretastes of a finer life that the few and fit 
become. 

Two notes mark this phase of American life. One is 
the prevalence of anecdote. The diner-out is not likely 
to be as witty as the Englishman; but he has more 
anecdote and a better way of telling a story. He is not 
afraid of speaking like a book on occasion; he is more 
histrionic than the Englishman, more humorous, more 
kindly, more sensible of himself as a man divested of social 
place. He is apt to be unguaranteed by ancestry, but 
invited because he is interesting. He may have won this 
interest by suddenly developed power, or by mysterious 
backgrounds, — always he must be able to talk. One 
can hear stories told by literary men, ministers, soldiers, 
captains of industry, and most of them with a trick of 
verisimilitude and dialect that catches the listener M-ith 
delight. They also impress the listener with the sense of 
a wide range of sympathies where the generous instincts 
were in full play. The man next to one may be a "city 
magnate," or a plain country parson, invited to the 



196 The Temper of the American People 

metropolis by a hostess who met him in his comitry 
parish and grew interested in him, or a travehng foreigner 
met abroad, or one lecturing before some university, or a 
business man; but the indispensable thing is that each 
man shall talk. 

In the topmost society one does not meet the traditional 
greatness possible in England; where a duke on each arm, 
as Thackeray pictured it, might conceivably be achieved; 
but the guest of American hospitality is likely to meet a 
far wider range of interests than in the same field in Eng- 
land. And this is particularly true of the more modest 
ranges of life. A European countess may take tea with a 
country minister's wife, a world-famous professor from a 
German university dines with a struggling professional 
man, an English nobleman with a soap manufacturer, an 
ItaUan duke with a young lawyer, an American woman 
whose hand had been kissed by an emperor wath a college 
teacher, the wife of the President may spend an afternoon 
in a country manse. The American, when he touches 
Europe, because he is an American, gets into regions where 
his European similar could hardly come, because he is a 
European. Though the American may be of the same 
area as the middle-class Englishman he is not permanently 
encamped on the range next below nobility, and he does 
not suggest to the man above that he means to gain an 
equal footing. The high ranges of the older life accept 
him freely because he is an exotic, and not a possible 
competitor. And this adds interest to the traveled 
American. 

Besides anecdote and story, the American conversa- 
tion is likely to consist of opinions less determined by class 
traditions. There is no indication in the present position 
of the American as to what he was originally. He may be 
in law, theology, medicine, or "gas," or "stocks," or 



The Sentiments of American Society 197 

"shoes," — or simply an unknown who may be the younger 
son of a nobleman thrust out to earn a Uving, or a man 
who started life on a Western "claim" in a two-roomed 
"shack," and is now an expert on economics. But what 
he was would fill a story-book. The college man may 
enter ten different businesses within two years of gradua- 
tion, — one reported trying thirteen before he fomid a 
tentative place, only to leave that later for an absolute 
change in life three thousand miles away from his old 
home before he "arrived." But this discipline, change 
and adaptation, give an individual position to those who 
experience it. The man belongs to no class, and what 
he says will not be traditional or historical, but individual 
and personal. His judgment will be fresh and acute, 
until he settles down to the Toryism that comes with 
years, or that results from "interests" in the business 
sense. But in the most elevated regions he is likely to 
keep his personal point of approach to life. 

And the women of these selected areas, who can do 
them justice? They are well dressed, — better far than 
the Englishwoman, — they have a subtle horror of the 
too much in color or form. There is a more delicate beauty 
in their persons, a more delicate sense of intellectual issues 
in their minds. The fat dowager is eliminated; so is the 
ingenuous young person. They are more sophisticated 
than the Englishwoman, more serious in a sense, playing 
for stakes that they will have to win themselves, born 
generals, — conquerors. Often they have "done things" 
themselves; almost always they could do things if called 
upon. What society they form, is a conquest out of social 
chaos. There is no social history behind them for the 
most part; they have to make it, and they have to make 
their instruments too, for no patrimonial loveliness im- 
proved for generations was bequeathed to them. They 



198 The Temper of the American People 

have no set relations making a comfortable framework 
for them merely to fill out. More likely than not they are 
the second of their name to achieve fortune and education. 
Moreover, the lower ranges of life do not minister to them 
as in England. Their households are always on the edge 
of a labor crater. There is no deference inborn beneath 
them to give them an almost royal air. And yet they 
have achieved so much. 

VI 

When we consider the specific feelings of American 
society, at the very start we find an interest in elaboration 
as such. Society all the way through is more organized 
than in England, not only because it works better form- 
ally if elaborated, but because the symmetry of elabora- 
tion appeals to Americans. The clubs, for example, have 
their routine methods of advancement. The official must 
go through the mill. One must serve three years on the 
executive committee to be its chairman, then three years 
as chairman to be president. When president one may 
look to ofiice in a federation, at last hoping to be presi- 
dent of this larger unit, with all the social estimation that 
this implies. 

The sporting side of life is rigidly organized too. The 
youth who intends to be a player, or an athlete, or even 
the manager of a department of college athletics, has to 
go through a stern novitiate, and then often fails of a 
place. He takes it as the clubman takes it, as an order 
of nature. He does not "kick." On the contrary, he 
smiles knd says, "The best fellow won." He must not be 
irregular; he must not stop the machine though it grinds 
him to powder; he must not throw any doubt on the 
elaborate system. Meanwhile, if he does not win a place, 
he shouts for his side; but even here he feels compelled to 
organize, and his shouts are "organized cheers." Nothing 



The Sentiments of American Society 199 

is left to him alone, the issues are too great. The day 
before the game no one in college can work, sleep, or eat, 
the interests at stake are too important. Thus in both 
cases over-elaboration defeats its end. The club kills 
society by machinery; the game kills pleasure by 
seriousness. 

Here we come upon another feeling in American social 
life, namely, intensity. The American plays as he works. 
If an hour of pleasure lies before him, he will pour into it 
all it will hold. He has not found out what Rodin found 
out in Holland, that "there is beauty in slowness." The 
collegian will often get drunk before his college game, and 
more often after it; or he will develop a kind of hysteria 
as bad in results. The "fan" and "mucker" who sit on 
the "bleachers" at a baseball game energetically chew gum 
or tobacco during the game. In some of the theaters a 
box of candy is fastened on the back of each chair so that 
the matinee girl can mitigate the longeurs of the play. 
Dozens of people, not to lose a minute, read the papers 
while the scenes are shifted. The intensity developed by 
the great college games is astonishing. It is the academic 
counterpart of the intense feeling aroused in political 
conventions. On both occasions the perfectly respectable 
citizen will roar himself hoarse, and play antic tricks, 
uncovering the aboriginal self for a moment without shame. 

WhjT^ does he do it? "For the good of the college," 
"the good of the party," is the answer. And this brings 
into view the purposive nature of American amusement. 
There is generally connected with it some ulterior motive, 
not bad, perhaps, but interested; and society, like art, 
in its amusements, if they are to be art, must be disin- 
terested. All the way through the scale of amusements 
there is some interested purpose : they are never for them- 
selves, or for pure delight; — something follows from them. 



200 The Temper of the American People 

In the highest society too many amusements are tied to 
civic interests or to philanthropy, A new theater or 
opera house is apt to be the "pride of the city," and an 
advertisement of it, rather than a place for satisfying a 
fundamental need. Just as the college game is to be won 
for the good of the college, so the professional city baseball 
team, that may not have a single local citizen in it, is ap- 
plauded, because it bears the name of New York, Boston, 
or Chicago. To play a game for the sake of the play, — 
to go to amusements that are social for the sake of being 
amused, — seems inconceivable to the American mind : 
there must be something in it for someone or some 
institution. 

The intensity of America shows in the free use of 
materials to forward the interests of amusement. This 
adds to the spectacular quality of the sight of America at 
play. In the great games the spectacle of forty thousand 
people swayed by a common emotion moves the observer, 
and for many of those present this is the most fascinating 
aspect of the event. But there are also dexterities, poses, 
adaptabilities, and team play, that may prove an aesthetic 
countervail against the inherent individualism of American 
life. The same process of thought, or rather instinctive 
reaction, makes America spend more than she need to 
keep up the art of the opera. Not able yet to sift her 
artistic emotions she thinks that the number of great 
singers heard together makes for ultimate satisfaction. 
She has an eye to the materials of art and amusement, 
and the money to procure them at the finest, and is there- 
fore blinded as to the apperception that she should bring 
to them to make them of most avail. The later genera- 
tions, however, who may be trained by time and leisure, 
will have the advantage, in one field, that comes from 
plenty of the materials of judgment. For the American 



The Sentiments of American Society 201 

collectors of art have bought regardless of cost when a 
masterpiece was in the market. The student goes abroad 
to see antiquity in art; but some day not far off, Europe 
will have to come to America to see the art of today; for 
her collectors have been swift to recognize the more recent 
masters, or more willing to take a chance. 

At present America is in the joys of possession; in due 
time she will get the habit of riches, and be at leisure to 
find out what her possessions mean. Indeed, she does try 
to find out in the finer reaches of society by a confessional 
frankness as to the things she is doing and meaning. The 
supposed boastfulness of the American is here smoothed 
down to a personal candor that is quite likely to tell what 
he thinks about the deepest issues of life. His practice 
may be confused; his beliefs unreasoned; his emotions 
not altogether those to be proud of; but the hearer is 
welcome to them. He will tell a company of men in a 
public gathering how he felt in intimate situations, and he 
does it because he assumes they would do the same. It 
is as if he said, "Here is my house, make yourself at 
home, you will use it as I would." — "Here is my mind and 
heart, — it is just like yours." This is the ultimate of 
democracy, — to affirm unity of interests and feelings, 
and to found society on this affirmation. 

But extreme candor also takes something away from 
life. If the candid man tells us too much we find that 
understanding him we rather despise him; for the quality 
of infinity disappears. If he does not tell us all, when his 
tone implies that he does, the feeling that there is hypoc- 
risy somewhere comes in to spoil our relations. In both 
cases we lose interest in him. The open and confessional 
style of life, therefore, at times, tends to make life seem 
shallower than it should be, and it is fair to say that this 
is one of the effects in American life. To judge by the 



202 The Temper of the American People 

impression left by lyric poets, it is the unexplorable re- 
mainders of consciousness that constitute the delightful 
problem of the eternally feminine, that in its own place 
is the subtlest enchantment of society. And man, too, 
cannot forget this personal quality, that stands in the 
place of infinity, without loss. 

Perhaps the American is not quite so candidly con- 
fessional as he appears and does not aim at giving the im- 
pression of childlike frankness that the stranger imputes 
to him. He lives in public much more than the English- 
man. His house is not shaded and shuttered. He also 
moves amid a curious public that cares about his motions, 
speech, and ideas, — a whole public, and not a class. 
Hence he is betrayed into playing to the gallery as poli- 
tician, preacher, and even professor. Socially too, he 
plays to the gallery. While his anecdotes are interesting 
bits of the general conversation, they may be overdone 
and they are too many. He will tell one after another to 
gain a laugh; and to make the matter more sure he puts 
them in the first person. Often in public speech he be- 
littles his theme by some exordium or anecdote dragged 
in for untimely birth. In the same spirit he writes in 
large emphatic phrases, and seems to be shouting at his 
hearers from a stage or from a hoarding. Far more than 
in England, in spite of the ceremonial orders of life in the 
older country, America has a distinct sense that all the 
world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players, 
and each has many parts. The American plays them well 
too; but there should be more personal identity beneath 
the mask. 

The confessional and histrionic temper, however, is far 
better than the social conspiracy of silence about the very 
things most worth talking about that too frequently 
oppresses the Englishman. At the very least it tends to 



The Sentiments of American Society 203 

the exercise of intellect, and American society is more 
intellectual in the middle ranges of life than is the case in 
England. It is apt to be so because there are many col- 
lege-bred persons in it. This intellectuality may be, and 
often is, too urgent, too striving, a desire rather than 
a reality; and, as we have seen, it is too recent and too 
insecure, bowing down to a general opinion instead of 
standing up for consistent thinking; but at the top it is 
loosening itself for critical work. In academic circles 
there is a continual movement towards a free criticism of 
life and of the accepted platitudes of political and moral 
conduct. One hears in society, also, severe remarks on 
some aspects of American life and a growing appreciation 
of the finest standards of Europe. Even when not critical 
America is intellectually curious. It has the gift of the 
unstopped ear, if not the open mind. And it must be 
acknowledged that the elaboration of life, and the free 
use of money, have often brought within reach the raw 
materials of social good, that minister to curiosity, and to 
the finer emotions that often follow. 

In a final aspect, American society, as in the case of 
all society, is a mode of personal gratification in the form 
of personal development. And, of course, it takes practice 
to win the highest qualities of social poise, as well as some 
natural gifts. 

American society is personal development in the process. 
So, at times, it seems too much like dress rehearsals that 
lack the freedom of the final moment when the actor finds 
himself by losing himself in his part. It rarely seems quite 
the thing, — perhaps no society does; but in America 
the social function gives the impression of trying on a 
social style to see if it will fit. This is not always the case; 
but in the larger regions of national life it almost always 
is the case. There is on these occasions a tremulous inse- 



204 The Temper o/ the American People 

curity, and often a real embarrassment, because no one 
has seen the thing done by the acknowledged leaders of 
fashion, — if there are such leaders in America. Social 
manners are the most obvious illustration; people do not 
know how to dress for specific functions; they are apt to 
inquire of their neighbors; nor do they know how to stand 
in hne of precedency. There are many receptions where 
the most obvious demands of good taste are outraged, 
because there are no fixed rules accepted by all, nor is 
native feeling left to do its instinctive work. To refuse 
canons while denying instinct, lands one in a debatable 
region, where things in general make for unrighteousness. 
Within the last twenty years there has been a decided 
descent in the national manners. This has been noticed 
by foreign and native moralists alike. Occasionally one 
meets faint relics of the older graciousness even in the 
North, where it has always been less evident than in the 
South; but when met it seems to belong to a world so 
different from the present that it has a flavor of pathos. 
The American climate, in large areas, is against manners, 
and the headlong speed of the day is still more so. So is 
the indisposition of parents to undertake the moral strain 
of domestic discipline. And so is the contemporary 
newspaper. The manners of the young have doubtless 
been exasperating to the elders of each generation, but it 
remained for our own day to urge on the disrespect of 
youth for all that was above and beyond them, through 
the example of a degraded humor. Bad as manners are 
in America they are likely to be worse in the next genera- 
tion, with the added pressure and ignorance of the foreign 
population, which by that time will have learned too well 
the naughtiness pictured in the colored supplement of the 
newspapers, by the side of which Tobias Smollet is classic 
reading. 



The Sentiments of American Society 205 

But still, again, one must not leave this as the final 
word; for in all areas of American life there are elements 
of grace and beauty, of direct and contagious simplicity, 
of truest worth and loveliness, — in a word, of ideals that 
touch a spirituality prophetic of a better day. 



CHAPTER X 

THE ADMIRATION OF EDUCATION IN AMERICA 



THE common European opinion of American intel- 
lectual life, unhappily formed on caricature of its 
least representative examples who stand out rawly in the 
suave surroundings of older countries, is far from the 
truth. America, it is true, is overweighted with a popu- 
lation that reduces the height of average cultivation; but 
this population is not native, or it is so recently native 
that the old traditions of culture have only slightly affected 
it. The characteristic elements of rawness, that are so 
often affirmed of America, stand out most of all in those 
who are newly planted and lately successful aliens. The 
American of three generations is as likely to be an educated 
man, in the finest sense of the word, as the European who 
knows his great-grandfather. In many cases it does not 
take three generations to reach instructed excellence. 

Education, indeed, is one of the few American tradi- 
tions comparable with the universal and accepted social 
traditions of Europe. From the very beginning it has 
been an endeavor of the national life. The early origins 
of America were peculiarly fortunate in educational at- 
mosphere. So far as they were English they were neces- 
sarily affected by the great outburst of the English 
Renaissance, which touched with a colorable emotion the 
lowest as well as the highest ranges of English life. Among 
the leaders this outburst tended towards poetry and the 



Admiration of Education 207 

romantic exploits of the Spanish main. Among the 
emerging classes it tended towards university wit and 
brains; and among the technically illiterate it broke out 
in a passionate rhetoric, sometimes without much sense 
behind it, but quite as often pregnant with serious politi- 
cal and religious meanings. 

All these factors were transported across the sea. The 
mighty heroics of the Elizabethan temper touched America 
in the persons of Drake and Raleigh. The New England 
settlement was largely tempered with university learning, 
since there was no inconsiderable strain of gentle blood in 
the veins of the founders of the different colonies; and the 
mass of the early comers were men whose very breath was 
drawn in the serious and expansive air of religious and 
political debate. 

This tradition was manifested in the center as well as 
the circumference of life. In the earliest Massachusetts 
and Connecticut days parents were legally responsible 
for a partial education of their children. They were 
obliged by law to teach them to read. At the other 
extreme, the tradition was effectively illustrated in the 
early founding of schools, and especially colleges, whose 
walls were sometimes laid before the defences of the little 
settlements were complete, whence has issued a long and 
noble procession of youth for nearly three hundred years, 
to leaven the nation and become its natural leaders. 
Harvard College was founded in 1636, William and Mary 
in 1693, Yale in 1701, Princeton in 1746, Dartmouth in 
1769. And since then a great number of smaller colleges, 
and a few universities, have been founded in both the East 
and the West, some of which bid fair to rival the older 
foundations of Europe in influence, as they already exceed 
them in numbers. 

We can further see how persistent educational traditions 



208 The Temper oj the American People 

have been in America, when we look at the men who led 
the destinies of the country a hundred and fifty years 
after its settlement. We find them largely collegiate. 
Of the fifty-six men who signed the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence twenty -five were academic, eight of them coming 
from Harvard, three from Cambridge, and two from 
Edinborough, besides those who represented smaller 
colleges. Of the fifty-five framers of the Constitution, 
thirty-two were academic, London, Oxford, Edinborough, 
and Aberdeen contributing graduates, though Princeton 
predominated with nine names. No other country can 
show the national life so guided at its beginning, by the 
higher learning, as America. 

Besides the vital impetus of a fine academic history, 
which comprised the best elements of European educa- 
tional life at the start, America has been obliged by its 
own development to lay stress on the academic interpre- 
tations of existence. The first settlers had to frame their 
colonial policies, and to discuss the religious matters then 
uppermost which, indeed, were more imperious than they 
would be now, because mixed with matters of state. It 
has also been remarked, that at the later time of the 
Revolution, the ordinary citizen became an expert casuist, 
in learning how far he could go legally in opposing the'home 
government, and so escape punishment for sedition, while 
forwarding the enterprise of independence. And this 
interest in matters of law holds today, in the emphasis on 
points of procedure, which, if not soon remedied, will call 
for a satirist like Dickens to laugh the anomalies of law 
out of court, as happened with the worst practices of 
Chancery. But still this interest in law, so continuous in 
the national history, has value in the national life, as we 
see in the affirmation of President Cleveland that, ' if 
precedent only permitted it, and he had the time, he could 



Admiration of Education 209 

get a perfectly competent Attorney-General in the county 
seat of any county with which he was familiar.' 

Moreover, the present has its own problems of organiza- 
tion, demanding well-trained minds to deal with them. 
The theory of democracy implies education. If the citi- 
zen is not to wreck his state he must know something 
besides the eddying thoughts of his own local community; 
he must be kindled with large ideas, set free to great works, 
and have some conception of the coming world. 

While the new contact with Europe today adds to the 
determination of many Americans to fit themselves for 
the contingencies of a more complicated society than the 
one they know at home, and to prepare for a sympathetic 
appreciation of art, and human life, the present impetus 
of America towards learning is due most determinately 
to the feeling that the sovereign people shall be fitted for 
their empire. And this determination grows more reso- 
lute each decade, as the swelling flood of souls, ignorant 
of American history, tumbles in upon the Atlantic shores. 
In these, America has to create ideals and national longings 
from the very beginning, besides doing a work for the 
children of her own household, comparable with the 
entire work in education in older nations. It is a task 
never equaled in history, in the expenditure and exercise 
of treasure, mind, and heart. 

II 

America begins this double work of education, — the 
cultivation of her own sons, and the discipline of alien 
stocks, — in the common schools. 

"The little red schoolhouse" is an object of peculiar 
esteem with the American people. It is there that the 
young idea has been encouraged, later, perchance, to 



210 The Teviper of the American People 

become a fruitful good to the state. There, also, has 
often occurred a page or two of romance, as the school- 
teacher brought the elements of refinement to the notice 
of youth and first disturbed it with immortal longing. 
These elements were often only apprehended momentarily, 
and at the best may have been fragmentary, but they were 
the stuff of the passions in finer forms than were common 
before the teacher awoke the ancient harmonies. The 
American novelist has laid hold of this fact and has worked 
it out imaginatively in many a story where the teacher 
becomes a goddess directing the machinery of life, as 
Lady Castlewood was for Henry Esmond. 

In the cities the grammar-schools are vast instruments 
for turning out citizens, whatever may be the result in 
real culture. The defect in the country schools is the 
lack of effective teaching, as one young person, and that 
one inexperienced, covers all the branches of elementary 
learning. The defect of the city schools is the machine- 
made kind of graduate that is groujid out of them. Little 
attention can be given to particular cases above or below 
the average, so that special aptitudes, if not discouraged, 
are not much helped. Yet these irregular cases may be of 
the deepest import to the national life. One cannot hon- 
estly say that education gets very far along in these pre- 
liminary trials, always excepting the development in 
patriotic interest. The American child is sure of his 
country, its greatness, general rectitude, ideals, and future. 
And this, with so many who would otherwise get no con- 
ception of a country at all, is a great gain in the national 
life. 

Above the grammar-schools there are the high-schools, 
in many cities noble buildings, where hundreds of pupils 
of both sexes are gathered. Here the problems of educa- 
tion are as confusing as anywhere. There are pupils 



Admiration of Education 211 

who are to go no further in their schooUng, who need a 
general course to awaken sympathy with the probable 
world they are to enter. There are those who are to go 
to a business school. There are others who are to go to 
advanced technical schools. There are still others to go 
to college. 

All the higher institutions have their own standards of 
admission, and most of them differ; hence the work of the 
secondary master is largely determined and determined in 
multiple forms. Moreover, the high-school is a means to 
an end, and there is therefore little opportunity of im- 
pressing the lessons of academic disinterestedness. The 
specter of a "career" fronts the student: he must be good 
for a specific thing, an examination, a detail of business 
administration, and outside of this he is uninterested. 
He has time only for atliletics, not for outside cultivation. 
He is exceedingly raw. This appears in the inadequate 
furnishing in English literature disclosed in college en- 
trance examinations, — a subject in which girls do better 
than boys. Yet some recent answers in a girls' college 
open up abysses, when, out of one hundred and eighty-six 
girls, fifty-three could not tell what century Shakespeare 
lived in, though either the sixteenth or the seventeenth 
would have been taken as correct; and one hundred and 
eleven were unable to place Dickens in his proper century. 
On the whole, the American scholar of high-school age 
has neither the wide interests, nor the discipline in learn- 
ing, of the English scholar, and still less of the German. 

Moreover, the sex factor disturbingly enters. The boys 
and girls are too close together for the good of either. 
There may be foolish attachments formed, though these 
are not as common as one would suppose; the trouble is 
the other way, — the stolid opposition of the boys to the 
girls because the latter often excel them in studies. 



212 The Temper of the American People 

Among the girls there is a mascuUne tendency developed, 
because of the idolatry of athletics. And occasionally the 
atmosphere is too free to allow of the choicest bloom of 
girlhood. The great mischief is not to be set do\sTi to 
actual immoralities, though in some cases there have been 
tragic episodes, but in a weakening of the di\'inity that 
hedges sex, and a too close acquaintance with each other 
during the years when both sexes are going through 
troubled waters. 

But whatever the opinion of observers as to this difficult 
matter may be, one thing grows more plain, namely, the 
too great preponderance of women teachers in these 
schools. Many a youth, until he gets to college, has only 
infrequent contact with men teachers. It is sometimes 
alleged that this implies poor discipline; but many women 
teachers are quite as able disciplinarians as men, often 
better. The real misfortune is that the woman's attitude to 
hfe is bound to affect the pupil unfavorably, when it is the 
only one he knows in the pedagogical field. The youth 
will have to go out into a man's world, and he needs to 
get some inkhng of the attitudes and exactions that rule 
in this great commonwealth before he adventures into it. 
Something may be said for this feniinization of learning; 
though it has many critics. It tends to the finer and less 
brutallj^ direct approach to life, and accounts for the im- 
pression given by American men of a less seK-centered 
consideration of their own personality, than is the case 
with the majority of Englishmen. But an acute observer 
of national temper, Lafcadio Hearn, has called attention 
to the English method of education in vogue in the public 
school, which, taking life as a competitive field, drilled 
boys in "self-mastery as a means to the mastery of men." 
And while this system may possibly prevent the very 
greatest minds from developing, it still permits the state- 



Admiration of Education 213 

ment that "a boy of nineteen can, in a serious emergency, 
run the great Indian Empire." 

Just now another danger threatens, in the introduction 
of technical schools, where studies are taught that "fit 
the pupil for lifework." There is undoubtedly need of 
more thorough training in all the manual crafts as all 
employers know, but it is an uncertain good to push this 
discipline too far forward in the elementary education of 
the early grades, and to usurp the place of cultural studies. 
WTiat the boy or girl learns in these studies as practised 
in school, is not learned under the pressing rubrics of the 
world of time and space, that set the pace of the industrial 
life, but under a scheme that at the least is leisurely, — 
so leisurely that the pupils grow wearied of the tasks set 
for them to do. The worst of this new method is, that the 
time that should be given to feeding "the shaping spirit 
of imagination" is taken for something else, and the 
imagination never gets its proper chance again. Nothing 
can make up for the lack of contact with the imaginative 
culture of the race. A business man, speaking about the 
matter, said, " \Miat workmen need is not so much technical 
proficiency, as an imagination that sees how things ought 
to go." And an authoritative technical engineer recently 
affirmed, that technique might easily be started too early 
in the men who were going further in science, and that 
manual dexterity was no more needed by him in his own 
studies than it would be in literary subjects. 

In many places, particularly in New England, the 
academies, founded long before the high-schools, by pri- 
vate munificence, not always sufficient to keep the schools 
from financial anxiety, have a fairly satisfactory history. 
By degrees, however, they found their future difficult, 
because of high-school competition. These academies 
asked payment of tuition, and in most cases they drew 



214 The Temper of the American People 

their students from a distance and thus required residence, 
and these necessary costs gave an advantage to the high- 
school. There is now a slight tendency to return to these 
older institutions, for the sake of the atmosphere. Some 
of these schools have achieved a reputation equal wdth 
the more wealthy private schools, which have grown in 
importance and influence until they have almost reached 
collegiate place. The graduates of preparatory schools 
find they have a social advantage when they go to col- 
lege, partly due to school traditions conserved in college, 
and otherwise due to a finer style of manners and conversa- 
tion, and possibly to the fact that they may be rather older 
men, for the proportion of backward men in preparatory 
schools is larger than in the public schools. The age is 
apt to be higher because the pupils are sons of men who 
can afiford to keep their children in school longer and allow 
a leisurely education. 

IMuch outcry has been made by educational demagogues 
about the larger percentage of public school pupils who 
take high rank in college, compared with the graduates of 
private institutions; but it is fair to remember that almost 
all the pupils in the latter schools intend to go to college, 
regardless of native ability, while the pupils from the pubUc 
schools who go to college are the more selected men out 
of immense numbers. If as large a proportion of public 
school pupils out of the whole number proceeded to col- 
lege as the proportion out of the private schools, it is 
likely that the story would be the other way. \Miile at 
an advantage in the college life, the graduate of a board- 
ing school is at a disadvantage in the general life of the 
world; for his company has been exclusively that of his 
own age, while the boy who lives at home, if his parents 
are people of any refinement at all, is apt to meet older 
persons more intimately, who have been visitors at his 



Admiration of Education 215 

father's table. This, at least, is the contention of Mr. 
Frederic Harrison. 

Despite all drawbacks, the observer is constrained to 
admit that the system of primary and secondary education 
in the United States is very good for the main work it 
has to do. If Mr. H. G. Wells doubts if it is as good as 
the English system. Professor Mlinsterberg thinks it a 
system to be proud of. Most Americans coincide with 
the latter opinion. 

But it is to the campus that the youth of the country 
look longingly. In America a college education is looked 
on as a right and not a luxury. Not to have been to col- 
lege is deemed a misdemeanor of destiny. One continu- 
ally meets business men who were denied this advantage, 
who cry out on fortune for this denial, if for no other 
reason than that they are debarred from the university 
club. 

Among the colleges one differs from another in glory. 
Some are no better than high-schools; others are noble 
foimdations fit to stand with the older universities of 
Europe. Some were founded by religious societies, others 
by individual persons and private gifts, others by the 
commonwealth. They are not generally coordinated. 
Many of them duplicate the work done by others. Terri- 
torial pride, or the pride of a religious denomination, or 
the whim of an individual, has been responsible for some 
foundations that should never have existed. In some 
parts of the country the colleges are too close together. 
Local pride has often led to foolish elaboration in the 
instruments of learning, and neglected the real educa- 
tional force, good teachers. Simple ignorance also had a 
part in many a failure, as the trustees demanded the 
higher degrees in the faculty, when the doctorate might 
be a sign of inability to teach. Desire for large numbers 



216 The Temper of the American People 

often led to developments of collegiate life that meant 
anything but good to the colleges themselves. And a 
swollen cmriculum frequently became a real obstruction 
in the way of the higher interests of learning. 

The drift towards university studies in merely collegiate 
institutions has probably reached its highest point. 
There is now a gro\^-ing feeling that the small college has 
its own place, and that it should not usurp university 
functions. But whether it should go back again to the 
classical ideals of an earlier day is an open question. 
While some favor this, others dream of a differentiation 
of colleges brought about by a limitation of courses, and 
an appeal to special interests, thus impregnating under- 
graduate life with a flavor pecuUar to each institution, as 
in the English colleges. 

The desire to come up to the acknowledged standards 
in education has played an even larger part in women's 
colleges. At the beginning these had to prove that they 
could do the work of men, so they took the men's curricu- 
lum and kept it. But the men have moved away from 
the narrow hmits formerly bounding the educational field, 
so that the women's colleges represent the former ideals 
of education, and the masculine conception of those 
ideals. Educators are now beguming to see that the 
woman who follows this course is more out of contact 
with current life than men graduates, and some are asking 
whether women's colleges shall not become more feminine 
in their outlook, and each develop a specific educational 
chmate. Meanwhile the college man is apt to contemn 
the college woman, preferring something less masculine, — 
a creatm-e not too pedagogically good for human nature's 
daily food. 

Contempt is often expressed in England for the American 
degree. There have been, and doubtless are, places where 



Admiration of Education 217 

fraudulent degrees are offered. Probably there is no 
statute against a man writing A.M. after his name if he 
wishes to; but laws are less effective than pubhc opinion 
in this region, and a man soon gets found out if unworthy 
or a cheat. Titles are used \Tilgarly in the daily press of 
a certain kind, so that one may see references to "]Mrs. 
Dr. Jones" or "Assistant Deputy Commissioner of Works 
Smith"; but this is not the usage of society. Academic 
titles are received with more respect than poUtical ones, 
save the very highest; yet these titles are used more 
sparingly than in England. In Great Britain if a man 
is merely a Bachelor of Arts people know it; but in 
America, save for strictly academic functions, no refer- 
ence to this degree is made. Many an American Master 
of Arts is never known to be such, even to his daily 
associates. If a man is a Doctor of Philosophy this 
is noted oftener, but generally again in strict academic 
relations. In the case of ecclesiastical degrees men do 
not use them invariablj''; for ecclesiastical programs 
often omit all distinctions. The degree in America is 
valued less as a means of personal distinction than the 
formula of permission that allows men to be an integral 
part of the life of some noble foundation. It is an 
opportunity for loyalty. 

The personal factors in college life demand a brief notice. 
I There are the hea^y, serious minds, attracted by the 
I imagination of themselves in positions of leadership in 
the community when they are graduated. These are the 
I drudges of the intellectual life, who never can get beyond 
( mediocrity, who have no inkling of what real cultivation 
I is, and fall back into the unrecognized mass of men. 
! \Miy they came from farm or shop is always a mystery, 
' only exceeded in impenetrabihty bj'^ the mystery how 
I they ever got into college or out again with a degree. 



218 The Temper of the American People 

Then there are the serious minds with talents, that form a 
class from which the professions are recruited, men who 
are high-class students but have to work for their stand- 
ing. Next are the men of real genius, who take all the 
intellectual hurdles lightly, and who may be as effective 
in the social life of the college as they are in studies. Of 
this sacred band no prognostications can be made, but all 
things are possible to them. 

In the Western colleges the heavy, serious minds prob- 
ably are more numerous; in the Eastern colleges there are 
probably more who go to college for the sake of the per- 
sonal improvement they expect to gain in mind, or 
manners, or both. These try to get a "gentleman's 
mark," not too perilously near the probation line, repre- 
senting the minimum pass. These candid undergradu- 
ates have their enthusiasms and their prejudices, among 
the latter "the grind" whom they hate with an almost 
personal bitterness. They are apt to be slightly con- 
temptuous of their teachers if these are not also men of 
the world. In later years these "students" are apt to 
be as successful in the world as they were in the part of 
college life they essayed; one will find them managing 
affairs in the debonair fashion they learned to follow in 
college. Their point of view is strictly contemporary, 
but they seem to know how to meet life on its own terms, 
by putting abler men to manage the subordinate depart- 
ments. Of this class there are a few wild spirits who are 
on probation until they are suspended and go out into 
the darkness for ever. And beyond the classes I have 
mentioned there are the professional students of the 
schools, who, on matriculation in law or medicine, find 
out all at once that the world is a serious place with a 
ragged and dangerous front. 

As to the professors, few have the distinction that marks 



Admiration of Education 219 

the European faculties, or particularly those of Oxford 
and Cambridge, because few have the backgrounds of 
life that these have. They lack something in style and 
dignity. Often they are harried by the university system, 
that exacts day labor from them when they would be seek- 
ing new regions of thought. But the American professor 
has directness of approach, a great humanity, a sense of 
the existence of his pupils, a real love of learning for its 
own sake, and a great desire to impart it. Things are 
mended in England now somewhat, but one remembers 
the retort of Whewell to a student who complained that 
he had not done very much in college so far, — "If you 
wish to work there's nothing to prevent you." Altogether 
the American instructor is an admirable type of man who 
has been of large significance, and is to be of still more in 
the future of America. 

Ill 

Such, in brief outline, are the marks of American educa- 
tional life impressing the outside observer, who by good 
chance may have happened at times to have pushed into 
the penetralia of academic regions. It is now in order to 
consider the results of this education, in a few broad and 
typical classes. 

The early college training had three great tendencies. 
The first was a devotion to classical studies in a narrow 
and businesslike sense, that had no counterpart in Eng- 
lish educational life. It was a devotion like that of the 
English preparatory school, though more serious on the 
part of the student because he was more mature, and be- 
cause the discipline fitted a man for a career in letters, 
law, or theology. The American youth learned his classics 
and learned them well. He could make them useful as 
decorations of his public speeches, or disciplinary aids tQ 



220 The Temper of the American People 

the precision in his thinking that made him ultimately a 
genius at text-book writing. Lacking the wide purview 
of the university, and the traditions, — in themselves 
delicately cultural, — that the English college possesses, 
the American was bound to become didactic in an unusual 
degree. Moreover, he often "taught school"; and this 
again gave him somewhat of the expository attitude that 
marks so much of American educational life. 

A second tendency was towards the legal studies. These 
frequently used to come after the classical training already 
described, but also very often without preliminary college 
instruction. In most cases today law students follow the 
regular college course first, though there are still short 
cuts to the profession; the ways, however, are being fenced 
in more and more, and the man who tries to save time by 
taking education briefly suffers when he meets the men 
trained in the schools. 

Formerly the lawyer was a man of dignity in his com- 
munity, invested with a little of the solemnity of the 
minister, without his friendliness, perhaps on the whole 
better trained, fit for any development of life in other 
directions than his profession. He might look for political 
preferment; he generally attained a competence. But 
today the lawyer hardly reaches this eminence. Law is 
growingly subordinate to business, and no longer broadly 
constitutionalizes life, since it seeks precedents, and is 
technical, specialized, and timorous. There are a few 
great lawyers, but these are in the employment of great 
corporations, or they are consultants. The ablest men are 
not necessarily on the bench, with the possible exception 
of the Supreme Court. The best men eschew criminal 
practice, and general practice grows more precarious. 
The law is fast becoming a technical profession, and it is 
losing much of its former dignity and humanity. The 



Admiration of Education 221 

lawyer now stands on a parity with business men, and the 
latter are often slightly contemptuous of him for his 
quibbles and quiddities, his ingrained conservatism, and 
his inability to see or to use the open door. 

The third tendency was towards what was called belles 
lettres. The term has a little of the fastidiousness, — 
perhaps effeminacy, — that is typical of the early Ameri- 
can literary men. There is a noticeable mark of chaste 
self-consciousness in American literature that almost 
touches coldness. It misses the exuberance of con- 
temporary letters in England, much as the university 
wits of Shakespeare's day come short of the riotous 
energy of the Mermaid Tavern, when they frosted their 
allegories with too much mythology. Bryant is cold, 
Hawthorne is detached, Emerson walks the mountain 
tops. These men seem almost overtrained. There is no 
outburst, as with the English Romantic school; no high 
fantasticalness, as in the mid- Victorians. The most 
erratic of them all, Whitman, is self-conscious, purposely 
refusing art, the poet of over-civilized people, rather than 
the simple. The most naive, Whittier, misses torrential 
passion. Is it due to lack of living.? The English writers 
lived before they wrote; the Americans seem to live be- 
cause they wrote. Or it is because the Americans did not 
escape the Puritan scheme of morals, and so were debarred 
from looking at more than a few aspects of life, — and 
these with prepossessions about them that prevented the 
freest sympathy. 

Still, the results of American education in former days 
seem to many observers finer than those of today; for 
education has swung off into entirely new regions, and these 
lack the old imaginative appeal. It concerns itseK in- 
creasingly with the more material instruments of society; 
it measures, weighs, digs, builds; or it buys and sells and 



"^^^ The Temper of the American People 

calculates percentages; or it organizes, looks up prece- 
dents, narrowly interprets subsections of life as it scans 
dusty archives, for a forgotten fact in historv', or per- 
sistently seeks some troublesome item in comparative 
philologj'. And then it sets down the result in English 
butchered to make a doctor's hohday. 

In these labors the culture of the ancient days is for- 
gotten, — one that urged men to look unblinkingly at 
the large aspects of life, and offered the consolations of 
hteratiu-e and art and the steadying forces of the widest 
knowledge obtainable. With education diffused in 
America as nowhere else until recently, men will accept 
present fantasies in pohtics, medicine, and rehgion, that 
are incredible to the broader student, because they are 
unaware of what has gone before, and are unable to relate 
their special knowledge to the whole province of learning. 



IV 

The feelings of Americans towards education, or about 
it, have appeared in the foregoing pages in momentary 
aspects. Perhaps they may now be indicated a httle 
more formally. 

The fimdamental feeling of the American is that educa- 
tion is indispensable. This is not only for the salvation 
of the state, but for the salvation of his own soul. "VMiat- 
ever the blind goals, mixed "^vith the clearer beacons of 
life, that men pursue in attaining an education, one meets, 
repeatedly, yoimg men who are undergoing all kinds of 
deprivations to gain their ends. They will "work their 
way through college," and spend laborious days fighting 
the double battle against ignorance and want, sometimes 
breaking down in the process, sometimes reaching the 
goal of their desire. Parents deny themselves ruthlessly 



Admiration of Education 223 

to give their children a chance. A washerwoman keeps 
her daughter at school so that she can graduate with her 
class, and after a time, when she has saved money enough, 
go to college. Professional people send their children to 
college when the burdens are well-nigh unbearable; but 
the doctor, lawyer, and minister would deem themselves 
disgTaced if they did not send all their chiklren to col- 
lege. Business men, even when in a small way of trade, 
do the same. The American youth of this class has far 
more companions of his early schooldays hi college than 
out. For the American parent gives his children a chance, 
even if it means servitude for him, and the relinquish- 
ment of a broader culture in his own person. 

Of course, this means for most the conception of educa- 
tion as an instrument for opening up a career; and educa- 
tion has opened up careers. In the older orders of life 
men were fitted for their work less by cool forethought in 
the educational years, than by indirect volition. America 
is now taking direct forethought, and at the same time 
destroying some of the more delicate and effective marks of 
character. A man learns in order to succeed; he rarely 
thinks of succeeding in order to learn. The "career" 
fallacy begins early in life; for the child who fails to "get 
a part" in the graduating exercises, is too often looked on 
as failing in the grammar-school range. In the high- 
school, offices are sought in the class organizations, and 
in the public exercises, so that the youth may appear to 
succeed. The basest politics at times determine these 
matters; ballot-stuffing has not been unknown. In col- 
lege, the struggle is to get into the fraternities, clubs, or 
on the athletic teams, or in the literary or musical societies. 
A man will give two months' time to get on the staff of a 
college paper. 

The "career" is so important in the estimation of most 



224 The Temper of the American People 

people, that they push forward m the lives of theu- chil- 
dren, the hurry and struggle of later life, and real cultiva- 
tion, which is ripening of soul, can hardly take place. 
The undergTaduate may know his "major" subject, but 
he will not embark in conversation upon much else. The 
older generation is to blame for this, just as the alumni 
are to blame for excess m college athletics. Professor 
Wendell remarks the difference between France and 
America in the matter of a career, the conception in 
America being far more dynamic, as the youth, instead of 
being fitted for a place already constituted, is taught to 
open his own place. In its higher reaches education should 
make these legitimate ends subordinate to an attitude of 
mind that is flexible enough to hold intercourse with the 
growing world. The uneducated man is narrow-minded; 
he has no companionship beyond his little traveled street; 
and the American too often has this parochial mark upon 
him; for in the urgencies thrust upon him in his earliest 
years, life is exhibited as a fevered pulse-beat instead of a 
noble self-possession. 

Once again, the attitude of America to education is 
pedagogic. The American is a born teacher: he writes 
the best text -books; he has created a whole Sunday- 
school hterature. "NMiat he knows he can tell, and he 
likes to exercise his gift: he has not been expounding his 
national ideals for tlu-ee centuries for nothuig. The man 
below expects to have things clearly explained to him. 
Only the other day a poor huckster complained that a 
college man he knew could not do a certain sum in reckon- 
ing, or make the result clear to him, plaintively asking, 
"What is a college education for, anyhow?" To liis 
mind it was precisely to do sums, or anj-thing else, when 
asked on the moment, and to make the result clear. This 
teaching instinct is only equaled by the instinct to be 



Admiration of Education 225 

taught. From the "school-marm," who addresses adult 
interlocutors in the language of the kindergarten, to the 
liigher placed man who expounds from the platform or 
pulpit, all America is at school. Middle-aged men may 
be seen in university classes, and not infrequently on 
Commencement day in line with young men who might 
be their sons, waiting for their degree. 

Honor is due to the men who are so patient; but mis- 
givings arise as to whether they are not mo\dng about in 
worlds not realizable. All this seeking of help from above 
is not an unmixed good: it may chance to be within after 
all. And there is the distinct weakness of thinking that 
the pedagogical attitude is the supreme attitude towards 
life. The teacher deals with immature minds, and his 
business is largely to make the ob\'ious more ob\'ious still, 
so that he gets pathetically unaware of the subtleties of 
things. He puts life in a grammatical order, history in a 
sequence of dates, evolutionary force in a set of geometrical 
designs. He becomes traditional, routine, and in the 
face of new developments of deeper issues, incoherent. 
Pohtically, he has expounded the Constitution -^-ithout 
criticizing it; socially, he has used phrases and illustra- 
tions of them, without seemg that they still remain dark; 
and in real cultivation he has been too often a lost sheep. 
For cultivation is not didactic, it comes at last to inevita- 
biUty. Education is experience, and a knowledge of what 
to do with experience, not the retailing of other men's 
discoveries. The educated man is known by what he 
keeps dark, more than by what he expounds: selection 
is the great law, and the half is more than the whole. 
American education is not quite disinterested enough, does 
not seek the useless things enough, does not let loose the 
soul for distant flight. 

Many Americans feel the force of suggestions such a^ 



2^26 The Temper of the America?! People 

these; for America, today, is insecure about its education 
as it was not a decade ago. Education is now more often 
seen to be no automatic good, — no peerage bestowed on 
a traditional man, no kingdom coming down out of 
heaven. There are those who affirm that America is far 
behind other nations; and others who admit it is behind 
the day because of the complexity of its o-^n organization, 
which prevents swift realignment of its modes and goals. 
Many are now feeling that it is a form of action and 
reaction, out of which a man is to find himself and others, 
for a new stress is being put on the social demands of life 
as they affect education. 

Thus there are continual questions as to better ways of 
learning, better connections between teacher and pupil, 
stronger iu"gencies towards the finer life. \Miat America 
needs is distinction; yet this can never come directly; 
even tlie open mind will not give it. unless the things put 
in the mind make for this excellence. The problem of 
American education is largely one of unrestraint. In the 
new world life has been a passionate exploitation of things, 
leading to a passionate experience, and it has not had 
time or wisdom to sort out from the inchoate materials 
and ideals the best that has been felt and known. There 
are indications that this may come to be. 



V 

Indeed, America has had her academic ^•icto^ies and has 
them today. In general they are witnessed by the won- 
derful assimilative power of the national hfe, due pre- 
dominantly to the sj'stem of education. These conquests 
have been remarked enough in the preceding pages. 

But there are accomplishments also in the more subtle 
fields of cultiu-e, where the fruits are so hard to gather and 



Admiration of Education 2-27 

to keep, and where, perhaps, they often become indis- 
tinguishable, because of the pressiu-e of the many who 
tend to keep down the level to an average estate. 

In the first needs of the national life there was the call 
for law, and in this field there are several illustrations of 
more than national greatness. The names of the Consti- 
tution builders occur at the start, and these are succeeded 
by men like Webster and Clay, who certainly compare 
favorably with their European contemporaries. An 
Englishman remembers the impression that Webster made 
on Carlyle as "one of the stiff est logic buffers and parha- 
mentary athletes an\"where to be met with in oiu* world 
at present." And the whole body of American law stands 
as a monument of rare legal abihty, applied in thorough 
fashion to the national needs. The Supreme Court is 
probably the most consistently able coiut in the world. 

Even at the extreme in national cultivation furthest 
removed from the field of law, and generally thought to 
exliibit American weakness most of all, — the field of art, 
— something has been done, and more is promised in the 
rapid increase of wealth and education. America was the 
first to appreciate the Barbizon school of painting, besides 
being, as we have seen, open to the values of the Impres- 
sionist school. She has sent several awakening spirits 
to Europe to show a way hitherto untraversed. "VMiistler, 
Abbey, and Sargent are more than notable: the first is 
likely to be reckoned almost the beginner of an epoch. 
Li sculpt are she falls below France, which has the great 
genius of Rodin outdistancing all competitors, but by the 
side of the EngHsh workers in this field she has no cause 
to be ashamed of the work of St. Gaudens, Daniel French, 
and Barnard, who are uidi\'idual enough to blot out the 
remembrance of the era of Powers' Greek Slave. In 
architecture America has all extremes; but she has made 



228 The Temper of the American People 

a house convenient for the tasks of domestic life as the 
house never was before. In a few of her pubhc buildings 
she has examples that are equal to the best work of recent 
times, while her known atrocities do not have the disgrace 
of the atrocities of Europe, that often occur in the face of 
a pro\'idence represented by the admitted masterpieces 
of other days that are immediately contiguous. In 
America there are now a few railroad stations that are as 
noble as ancient temples, and as solid as the '* indeterminate 
duration" that Johnson felt to be the mark of Diu'ham. 
There are some libraries not to be excelled in the modern 
art of the world, and some churches that foUow the best 
models, and in their simphcity rebuke the early Nineteenth 
Century re\'ival in England. Americans are in the habit 
of criticizing their own artists unduly, and of depreciating 
the progress of their art. There is great promise for the 
days to come, in spite of the philistine who orders a 
Botticelli bigger than any known, and is determined to 
have it, "even if he has to get it made." 

These particulars, however, are not the chief results of 
native cultivation that America has given to the world. 

The great bequest lies, first, in the New England school 
of wTiters and the note that they struck in literary art, 
and the interpretation they gave to life. In them America 
gained articulate expression, even though they did not 
always free themselves from European tradition in minor 
details. In spirit they are native and also new. Long- 
fellow, Ha^%i:horne. Lowell, and above all Emerson, illus- 
trate a culture at once noble and rare. Emerson is the 
American par excellence, though there are, at first glance, 
apparent denials of an^'thing of the sort. He is almost as 
aloof from Europe as Hawthorne. He knows history but 
is unterrified by it, and plucks a name here, a name there, 
to serve his purpose, unaffected by its continuity. Great 



Admiration of Education 229 

names are examples for him, not to be worshiped but to 
be equaled. He wanders through all periods, and his 
thought is ''granular and separable." He does not love 
the present, though he respects it; he does not love the 
past, though he reverences it. ^Yith Plutarch he holds 
the world to be a proud place, but he never seems to be 
quite at home in its frosty corridors. He is not merely- 
isolated from fleshly humanity, but insulated, speaking 
his own word, breathing the air of the higher belts, and 
painting the emotions of the mountain tops. 

All this seems far from the American genius, but in 
reahty it is its very stujff . For the American hves in large 
spaces, is as indi\'idual as he dares to be, and above all is 
as optimistic as Emerson, in thinking himself to be the 
maker of his own destiny. And at his heart, there are 
the throbbings of eternity in ideahsms that catch like a 
contagion. 

The other great bequest of American culture is in the 
field of philosophy. Here again the popular opinion of 
Europe needs correcting and refining. America is idealistic 
in its thinking at the severest that this thinking attains. 
And in the thought of one of her noblest sons — the late 
WiUiam James — there is started a pregnant movement 
that is like to overrun the earth before it is done. Prag- 
matism is intensely American, for on the one side it criti- 
cizes the autocratic absolutists in the metaphysical world, 
and on the other it affirms man as the measure of things. 
It will doubtless grow more cautious in the process of time, 
especially when the brilliance of its first attack is over, and 
it stops to reorganize itself so that it may hold what it 
has won; but it tends towards freedom in the mind. 
Apart, however, from this movement, there are other 
names in American philosophy that make an outburst in 
intellectual life not dissimilar from earlier periods that 



230 The Temper of the American People 

we now conceive as immensely formative in the history of 
thought. And -vNath some of these turning to the scrutiny 
of the principles of national life, there is hope that at last 
better conceptions may percolate dowTi into the subor- 
dinate ranges of social and national experience. Then 
understanding will wait on activity, and activity will fling 
itseK upon eternal ends. 



CHAPTER XI 
THE MORAL AND RELIGIOUS TEMPER OF AMERICA 



WHEN we seek for the origins of a national religious 
life, in most cases we find that the movements of 
the religious consciousness, once doubtful and shadowy, 
have already taken on the attributes of definiteness. 
They are defined in their direction by a great mass of 
almost overpowering sentiment and tradition. Once they 
were vague inner emotions, but now they are determined 
by sanctions that have won the joint acquiescence of the 
soul of the believer, and the power of the state. 

Historic religion, indeed, is partly the instance of the 
state, which seeks to protect itself by every available 
means. Thus it comes to be not merely an inner consola- 
tion, but quite as much, or more, an outer social order, 
with the penalties that attach to an infringement, and the 
rewards that are due to loyalty. The tribe, or the nation, 
in order to safeguard the community life, pushes its 
present needs into the eternal categories. To touch its life 
is to offend heaven; to offend heaven is to endanger its 
life. So, in the early forms of religion, when society is 
at all developed, the church is the state, the state is the 
church. And while in the later forms of religion there is 
some alleviation of the tyranny of this situation, more 
than vestiges remain. 

In the settlement of America, the difference between the 
old order and the new vision comes out most clearly. 



232 The Temper of the American People 

For the imperative need of the early settlers of Massa- 
chusetts was to escape completely from the old and social 
sanctions of the religious life, which had gone their own 
way apart from the soul, and had separated so far, that 
only by a great act of imagination could they be derived 
from their original source. Too often in the older land 
the political and legal sanctions of religion usurped the 
place of religion itself. 

Hence, at the beginning, American religious life is his- 
torically negative, compared with the life it sprang from. 
It broke away from the historic or subsidiary aids that 
men had slowly put about it, or had offered to it as instru- 
ments. It put three thousand miles of turbulent ocean 
between itself and the monuments of faith. And it sought 
to create an equally impassable distance between itself 
and the ecclesiastical systems that had borne upon it so 
heavily before its departure to a new continent. It also 
put aside the ritual expressions of religion, some of which 
had been repugnant to its deepest convictions for at least 
a generation, besides others that came to be considered 
repugnant only through an excess of conscience. Ameri- 
can religion, therefore, at the start, was somewhat prickly 
and sensitive. It spoke in negatives; it was dissident; 
it was not altogether humane. Its idealism was other- 
worldly. So far as the present gave it concern, it was a 
present that coidd be made into an ante-chamber of 
eternity. 

While reading the early matter of religion in America, 
one feels something of this profound dislocation of men's 
sympathies. It is indeed a wrench to emigrate into an un- 
known land; but many an immigrant, while he readjusted 
his standards, has stayed himself with the thought of the 
land he left, and all the values current there. What 
strange nakedness of soul awaits the man who goes forth 



Moral and Religious Temper 233 

to a country not yet created out of the womb of night, who 
at the same time bitterly rejects the hxnd he left! The 
earliest Americans came just after the time when English 
history made its most spectacular appeal, in the Shake- 
speare Chronicle — Drama; — just after the rousing na- 
tional consciousness had flamed into passion against Spain. 
All this was put aside, and it was put aside with bitter- 
ness. History was to be as though it only existed as warn- 
ing and example, for it all went the wrong way. What 
had the religious man to do with the spectacle and hopes 
of Vanity Fair? He had better forget them, nay, deny 
them. 

Indeed, part of the desire of the earliest settler in Massa- 
chusetts was not merely to forget, but to be forgotten. 
He did not wish England to remember him, because, if 
she did, she might also remember the engines of ecclesi- 
astical oppression. To be let alone was his one great desire, 
and this desire was not a mark of Massachusetts solely, — 
it had some parallels in Maryland as well. Hence it is 
no wonder that the Puritan spirit in America developed, 
along with its individual concern, a profound earnestness, 
since there were no human distractions to temper its fierce 
introspection. And this earnestness was further subdued 
to the colors of the scene it fell upon. The American 
Puritan came to a primeval continent. He did not 
know it; he only felt the immensity of its unknown forces, 
the terror of imaginary hostile powers, the presence of a 
spiritual v^orld as demonic as the Indians who fought him. 
He was like a child away from home, obliged to go to bed 
in the dark, while suffering from a disordered digestion. 
The terrors of life took hold of him. Is it any wonder 
that he sometimes fought at shadows? or that he failed 
to distinguish angel from devil? 

His English brother soon recovered a healthier-minded- 



234 The Temper of the American People 

ness; for he was surrounded with the smiling monuments 
of the past, and his other-worldhness was moderated by 
the beginnings of science, in the foundation of the Royal 
Society; and he soon came upon Augustan wit. The Puri- 
tan gloom was a pessimism as to the forms and structure 
of social life, but not as to the nature of things. The 
Puritan rejected the forms that religion presented itself 
ui, but not religion. Even the authority that he hated, 
was only a higlily specialized type of authority; in itself 
he kept authority as an ideal, and by degrees worked it out 
into reality. The Bible as "the religion of Protestants" 
was one form of this feeling; the supreme authority of the 
individual church was another. And it was not long be- 
fore both principles became dogmas, as perchance they 
needed to, in the exigencies of the formation of the new 
state. The Puritans were in the position of all radicals 
who object to a particular oppression emphatically, and 
in their heat and distemper deny the principles that under- 
lie government in general. These find that they have to 
frame the same principles afresh, and perhaps oppressively, 
because of their inexperience. In turn the radical becomes 
dogmatist and he often ends by becoming a tyrant as well. 
Yet in spite of all the flaws of the new order, painfully 
getting itself born out of the double disorder of the old 
history and the new needs, the early religious man of 
America came upon three things as centers of inevitable 
interest for his descendants. One was the worth of the 
individual soul, and the need it had for room and exercise 
in order to grow equal to its destiny. Another was the 
primacy of salvation as a concept in life, and a salvation 
that worked out through the betterment of soul-states 
into a finer social constitution. And the third was the 
primacy of the conscience in the field of conduct. In all 
the mutations of American religion these three things 



Moral and Religious Temper 235 

stand out as impressive factors, — individuality, salva- 
tion, and conscience. 

II 

The early rigor of Puritan life was tempered in time, 
as it was in England, though not so soon, and by far 
different factors. In England it came about by the natural 
swing of popular feeling, afraid of Cromwell's soldiers, 
and longing for the sunshine holidays of the past. It was 
affected also by the rise of science; and by the Continental 
invasion of thought that followed hard upon the great 
wars of Marlborough. Perhaps as much as by anything 
it was affected by the Augustan wit, that forgot serious 
religion for humanistic matter, and in turn forgot humanity 
for a laugh. 

In America the severity of Puritanism gave way before 
the coming of population. At the very start the Massa- 
chusetts colony had trouble with "sectaries." There were 
Baptist and Quaker invasions, as well as the influence of 
the milder spirits of the Pilgrim temper. Then came 
Episcopacy to some of the southern colonies, and Roman 
Catholics in time. Then came the great immigration of 
English, and the Germans with their national church, 
and the Irish with their historic devotion. Besides these, 
the purchase of territory, with fixed and indigenous re- 
ligion, vastly different from Puritan faith, made inevitable 
a weakening of the old rigor. 

Though once extreme itself, Puritanism has also been 
tempered by other extremes with which it has come in 
contact as it never could have done in the older land 
from which it came. 

On the one side the Roman Church has grown strong by 
the influx of immense numbers, who accepted its minis- 
tration in their old home. It ministers to the foreign, or 



236 The Temper of the American People 

half-foreign peoples who flood the ports, and preempt the 
minor or servile places in society. But even Romanism 
is modified in the transit across the seas; and it now has a 
liberal wing, of marked influence, as it must needs have in 
the atmosphere of individualism that envelops America. 
At least one cardinal, besides other high officials of the 
church, is doing his best to help on the civil ideals of the 
country. If only the gates of immigration could be closed, 
the liberal element in the church would no doubt modify 
the strictness of the letter, just as American Episcopacy 
has made more effective the ancient order it represents, 
by a wise development of democracy. 

In more recent days the Puritan ideals have been dis- 
turbed by native religions, some as repugnant to historic 
Christianity as the Mormon propaganda, or as near to it 
as the movement of the Disciples of Christ. In all large 
cities today, one may find fantasies of the soul nakedly 
displaying themselves, and showing the ineptitudes result- 
in from that dangerous thing, a little learning, especially 
when it omits history. All kinds of necromantic notices 
are given in the papers; handbooks of astrology may come 
to the innocent citizen in the mails; and even decent 
people too often rush to hear a new untempered gospel. 
America has gained freedom of soul by throwing over- 
board historical continuity of faith and practice; but she 
has lost perspective and balance by so doing. In all these 
fanciful outbreaks of religion there is less of the aridity 
that one meets in the more radical areas of English 
religious life, where secularism has exercised a good deal 
of influence. But in place of the dryness that marks 
English secularism there is so much that is impossible ex- 
cept in a world absolutely out of relation with rational 
life. It would seem as if America had not yet forgotten 
the demonic fear that troubled the first settlers in an abo- 



Moral and Religious Temper 237 

riginal world. While these eccentric phenomena are but 
small parts of American life, they are impressive because 
they occur in a society where education is generally 
diffused. They indicate an individuality that on provoca- 
tion may go succinctly mad. 

If we consider American religion in its civil aspects, 
there are two things that are noticeable. One of these is 
its separation from the state, and consequently its vol- 
untary support. There are no ecclesiastical officials, who, 
by virtue of their office, represent religion at functions of 
state. At the inauguration of presidents, governors, and 
mayors; or at the opening of courts and political con- 
ventions; or at the dedication of public buildings, prayer 
is wont to be made; but the selection of the clergyman 
goes by favor of someone who is managing the affair, and 
the invitation is considered a personal courtesy to the 
invited clergyman, rather than a spontaneous community 
expression of religion. For the man who arranges the 
matter there is the difficulty of settling upon a minister 
without giving some offence; and for the minister there is 
the feeling that the occasion is only formal, and he is 
loth to be the recipient of favors that are merely personal, 
and then to have them counted for community righteous- 
ness. American religion has slight formal relation with 
the state, and in the increasing diversity of rehgious 
expression it is likely to have still less. 

This brings into \aew the other social mark of religion 
in America, namely, its diversity. The observer is sur- 
prised at the multitude of sects, increased each year by 
new varieties. But their vitality in a local community 
is more wonderful still. Each of the larger sects formerly 
tried to plant a church in a new locality, too often regard- 
less of the real needs of the community; but a better 
spirit now prevails in place of the unlimited competition 



238 The Temper of the American People 

of the early days; and some of the more responsible denom- 
inations, through committees of comity, seek to prevent 
duplication of church edifices and activities, for the waste 
of the past is becoming obvious to the business men in 
the churches, who at last are likely to refuse support if 
the work is not well planned. 

There are places with too many churches that do not 
represent this intentional struggle, because they were 
planted speculatively, since every town expects in its 
early days to become a capital city. But the growth of 
population fell below the reasonable expectation. Human 
fallibility with respect to the future enters here as else- 
where. If, however, the community is overchurched, 
there is apt to be struggle as keen as in the business world, 
though not so open, for patronage and support, and the 
life of devotion suffers. On the other hand, the churches 
in this situation become social instruments, and give new- 
comers some approach to the community life, though, 
again, they tend to divide the larger town interests and 
keep the people in little church groups. How socializing 
they are, appears from the reported advice of a judge to 
a young lawyer, "Go to church: it pays." 



Ill 

There are four great phases of organic church life in 
America, and the first is the phase of devotion. Are the 
churches really religious? we may ask. This is a difficult 
question, for religion means so many things. If the ques- 
tion be kept to the idea of saintliness, it is even more diffi- 
cult to answer. In every church there are a few devout 
people, who pray and long for the nobler life within, who 
are students of the soul, rewarding speakers of the mys- 
teries of the deepest life, — " God-intoxicated " men and 



Moral and Religious Temper 239 

women. These, however, are not numerous. The life 
of devotion is apt to find an expression in the regular ob- 
servance of church services, in official action on committees, 
in doing the necessary work of the church. Devoutness 
in the finer and older forms grows rarer both in pulpit and 
pew. For this there are several reasons. The world that 
religion inhabits is now a world of secular force and science; 
it is breathless in pursuit; and, though an exciting and 
interesting world, it is wearying. Men and women be- 
come so used to the outer play of life that it seems to be 
the whole story. The wrestlings of soul that the elders 
experienced are not experienced now. Men do not live 
under the Great Taskmaster's eye because they are too 
conscious of the gaze of man. And the ministry has been 
partly to blame; for in some of its more public figures it 
has been too little steeped in the aroma of devotion. It 
has been, indeed, too businesslike. 

This leads to another aspect of American religious life, 
the institutional. Twenty years ago the church was a 
church in action. It felt that the poet's dream, and the 
prophet's ecstasies were not enough. It must "get to 
work," "tUl its vineyard," "save souls," "evangelize the 
world in this generation." Thereupon issued a number of 
subsidiary organizations in the church, that had their own 
constitutions, officials, duties, and rewards. The members 
of the churches, young and old, were asked to go into them, 
and help in the work they were formed to do. The 
churches opened night-schools for foreigners and others, 
gave plays in settlement houses, visited the slums, aroused 
a new interest in missions; and the societies aimed to 
cultivate a spirit of devoutness by pledging participation 
in the more ritual forms of worship. But competent 
observers think that " institutionalism " is done. It 
killed some of the clergymen who were most successful 



240 The Temper of the American People 

in it; it spoiled others who were not. It ended in frag- 
mentary work done uncertainly, in needless organizations 
that required pastoral labor to keep going, in sapping the 
spiritual life of the church. It was called "practical," 
"layman's work," and many other things; but it brought 
discredit on the church at times, because the work it did 
was not as well done as in other quarters, and it withdrew 
attention from the spiritual activities that the church 
alone could cany on. The church was no longer a home, 
a haven of refuge for toiling pilgrims, a place of consola- 
tion : it was a factory for souls, an arena of struggle where 
the busy might be more busy still. 

All this grew out of a serious benevolence, that consti- 
tutes another mark of the reUgion of America. It also 
shows the earnestness of the American, when he attempts 
to put his rehgion into practice; but it was a mistaken 
benevolence, for it reUeved the indi^^.dual who worked in 
a "society" of his own proper initiative. 

Much more effective is the monetary' "benevolence" of 
the American chiu*ches. The simis of money they give 
to their own missionary boards is immense, and the mis- 
sionaries constitute a great army of ci\'ilization spread 
over the four-cornered earth. And this is done while 
the American churches face great problems of church 
building each day, for the country' grows fast enough to 
demand immediate action in many a Western town. 
Even in the older communities new buildings are more 
frequent than in England: for the first churches were not 
built of durable materials, and besides, they were in many 
cases an offence to the taste of today. In one Xew Eng- 
land city, and in one denomination, even*- church but one 
has been rebuilt within about twenty years, — three of 
them \N-ithin five years, — at a cost of about half a mil- 
lion dollars. In manv corumunities the church makes a 



Moral and Relifioiu Temper ^41 



ri soaal Wk, and is Ad^ to do so stii laor? ^5 

1 foiBd vaidHig m tke cities, fakes tct . iz 

— :^- It cado^dsit fkeadbDakcaanoi a<:^. 

I^Q^^ haHi^hr, to fke etemJ l»/^- 

. : _ . ^ ^ « f;jtT wit ^ade 'siik 



" jMHialiif off 



242 The Temper of the American People 

pared and absolutely unequipped. Some of the finer 
spirits, otherwise headed for the ministry, halted at the 
perplexing prospect, unwilling to stumble into an invidious 
position, or to undergo the tumult of soul that theological 
reconstruction demanded. They also dreaded the pos- 
sibility of ecclesiastical controversy, in which delicate 
spirits do not shine. 

Still less were they willing to go into a profession where 
a commoner type of mind ranged in too large numbers. 
Theological students have not generally been the cream 
of the universities, any more than in England, either in 
mental fitness or social standing. In some sects the 
ministers may never have been students in the ideal 
sense, and sometimes not even in the actual sense, and 
the bearing and manners of such do not prove generally 
attractive to youth who might, under finer exemplars, 
be led to the professions. Still there are good men enter- 
ing the ministry, good in every sense, physically fit, 
socially and rehgiously. When these begin their work 
a noble career opens to them, for they are first among 
unequals, and the coming of such men into a community 
has been a revelation of what life means at its best. 

Perhaps some of the deficiencies noted are due to the 
lack of a heightening power that comes from history, or 
the distinction that grows in response to noble traditions 
in biography, or the indescribable influence of art, all 
of which aid the English clergyman. In spite of all, 
however, the American clergyman compares favorably 
with his English fellow. There may not be the note of 
preciosity that the Establishment reaches in a few cases 
of erudition or saintliness, but there is less professional- 
ism, more humanity, more actual contact with life in the 
main, than one finds in the majority of English ministers. 
If England has had a Newman, a Robertson, a Spurgeon, 



Moral and Religious Temper 243 

a Liddon, America has had a Bushnell, a Beecher, a 
Philhps Brooks. 

IV 

Before coming to a final consideration of American 
feeling in the field of religion, it will be well to look for a 
moment at the moral ideals that often run parallel. 

These moralities have appeared somewhat intermit- 
tently in many of the foregoing pages, but it may be well, 
for the sake of clearness, to set them down in a slightly 
hierarchical fashion. A difficulty at the start is due to 
the fact that Americans espouse moralities, like every- 
thing else, with enthusiasm. They do not live in half- 
way houses. They delight in the symmetry that results 
from a conclusion. The high-churchman who moved his 
communion-table an inch a week, till it touched the east 
wall, and so avoided giving offence to his low-church 
parishioners, was not an American, one is pretty sure. 
The American is apt, rather, to overdo his particular 
morality while the fit is on and so lose the permanent 
strength that comes of a wise relation of the virtues. This 
is evident in political house-cleaning, where, not infre- 
quently, good men are suspected if they do not empha- 
size stridently with the rest. In America one moral 
emphasis gives way to another. The old one is not denied, 
but forsaken or forgotten in the moment's new stress, 
and this makes the American appear hypocritical, when 
he is the last man to cover himself with another's cloak. 
Hypocrisy is distinctively not the Puritan vice. The 
Cavahers, or even the roysterers of the Caroline age, 
were inclined to the vice, as a reading of the memoirs of 
the worthy Mr. Samuel Pepys will show. But the Ameri- 
can with his extreme moral emphasis and his human 
f orgetf ulness is not hypocritical : he is simply inconclusive 



244 The Temper of the American People 

in morals as he is in political theory. He must "be him- 
self"; but the self is inchoate, a surge of varying impulses, 
still a fundamentally good will to all. In the community, 
as in the individual, expression is demanded on a moral 
issue, feeling runs high, the emotion is "tidal," the work 
is well done for a moment, but in the long vigils that 
liberty or morality demand, the American may be caught 
asleep at the critical moment. 

Hence follows the American morality of candor. If the 
American wishes to be himself, he wishes you to be 
yourself, so that he can communicate with you on a free 
platform. You are to hear and to tell of ancestry, educa- 
tion, works, and intention. Conversation is a modified 
form of the interview: you wish "to know your man," 
to have him know you, so that you start on an equal 
footing. If a man is up for an office his life becomes 
public property. In the ministry of the most American 
church — the Congregational — the minister at each 
settlement has to reopen old chapters of religious experi- 
ence, and be questioned about them, as well as about his 
present beliefs. In the very best sense the American 
"gives himself away"; you can know about him if you 
wish; he does not hide his light under a bushel. All this 
has value, though on the morrow he hardly reaches the 
moral heights he longed for in the evening after dinner. 
This frankness leads to a rapid readjustment of persons 
in new places; it prevents suspicion; it forwards joint 
labors. But no less it takes away from the sense of dis- 
covery, — the delightful penetration into personality that 
makes friendship and love so engrossing a business. 
Reserve has a value too. 

The prevalent American morality all seems to touch, 
on one side at least, upon the hatred of baseness. Here 
the American flames into wrath. He is a member of a 



Moral and Religious Temper 245 

large social and political family, and if he is "mean" he 
brings a doubtful note into the family life. So, when he 
espouses a side he is patient with its defects. All his 
relations with the social order partake a little of the 
sanctions of religion. It is not uncommon among the 
masses to find a criminal politician condoned because he 
stands by his fellows. The American is always standing 
by someone, or standing up for someone, — for his com- 
munity by speaking with pleasant contempt of a rival 
community, — for his college, — for his country. He 
speaks in public, grandiloquently, of the "dear old state" 
he lives in, — or left; in flamboyant political moments he 
goes into hysterics of loyalty at the mention of his native 
land. The American is always praising something or 
other, and the objurgatory soul finds him difficult to 
convert. He is positively unhappy unless he is effer- 
vescing with loyalty. All this makes him an admirable 
citizen, and if we take the word of Carlyle, as to admira- 
tion, it makes him a noble person too. In his enthusi- 
asm, he sets the life he praises in higher than realistic 
terms, and states its future goals, and so, by good fortune, 
comes nearer to them, since he has given these hostages 
of expression to them. 

Here we meet with another, and perhaps the greatest, 
morality of Americans, — optimism. The man lifted up 
by admiration is not able to see the things that pessimism, 
looking on the ground, is sure to find. In America, 
optimism is not a merely possible philosophy; it is a 
demanded morahty. The doubter may be fit for treasons, 
stratagems, and spoils. Possibly he may mend his situa- 
tion if the evils become unbearable and prick him on; 
but the man who loves his place will bring out of it all 
its hidden felicities. Such, at least, is the American atti- 
tude towards life. This also tends towards helping men 



246 The Temper of the American People 

to realize their opportunities with others, for it is far 
easier to intermeddle with joys than sorrows, and the 
optimist is surer of company than the man of doubtful 
mood. If I am free to run my ideal race, I shall be likely 
to look sympathetically on others who are trying to do 
the same thing. American optimism, therefore, issues in 
helpfulness. While the American may not be so uni- 
versally aware of poverty, nor so constantly called on to 
alleviate its pressure, as the sympathetic Englishman, he 
is a little more awake to the minor misfortunes of life, — 
say a child kept in jail for a day because of a prank, — 
or the upsetting of a load, — or any misadjustment irk- 
some to struggling people. He is always ready to lend 
a helping hand. 

There is one more morality, — morality per se, since 
the modern shift of emphasis from the state to the person, 
— that is assumed not to be too rigorous in America. 
No doubt the records of this appear to be sinister, espe- 
cially in the tale of divorce. 

But here, a fair mind must take account of other things. 
Divorce is cheaper and easier than in England, hence 
more frequent; but as to what lies behind divorce there 
may not be much difference. There are aspects of life 
in Europe that perplex Americans who travel thither and 
peer below the surface. The American keeps his sins 
on show in the front window of the daily press, set a little 
more garishly than is the custom in England. There is 
a fundamental' feeling in America that each soul has a 
right to try again for happiness as for other things, and 
that the horror of living together when love is gone is 
unbearable. If the way has been missed it is thought it 
may yet be found. In any case fettering together in- 
compatibles is a poor way of attaining sanctity. Do- 
mestic purity is as common in America as in England, 



Moral and Religious Temper 247 

and the integrity of the family as secure, whether we have 
in mind the range of hfe neither poor nor rich, or the 
range moderately poor. As for the excessively rich, or 
the pleasure seekers, there may be a slight difference to 
the discredit of America, but the difference may only be 
apparent, and due to the directness of American life which 
does not allow much to be hidden. In some of the more 
discreditable cases the persons concerned do not live in 
America so much as in Europe. The richest people and 
the idlest are almost internationals nowadays, and these 
afford the more notorious examples of domestic infelicity. 



Returning now to the interior and essential feelings of 
rehgion, we are ready to inquire what these are, as they 
are exhibited in the American consciousness. 

We consider first the feeling that manifests itself in 
ritual, and ritual means at least three things, symbol, 
social order, and tradition. The rituals of religion are 
socialized expressions of truths and feelings, made sacred 
by long usage, accredited by tradition, and expressed in 
symbolic form. Now it is clear that America, by reason 
of its start and emphasis, could not have strong ritualistic 
feelings. The tendency was plainly the other way. It is 
equally clear that symbolism would have to wait until 
the pressure of the early environment was lifted, and the 
gaining of the bare religious needs was secured. And as 
to religious traditions, these melt away, or are rubbed out, 
by the play of opposites, each of which, in the large experi- 
ence of American life, are placed in their proportionate 
national background. 

All this has left something of abruptness in American 
public worship. The aim is to be sincere, and to be help- 
ful to the weary souls of men in the most direct way; 



248 The Temper of the American People 

but too often it has been forgotten that joy comes by 
indirection, and that the Hght of the fringes of the stars 
is necessary, as well as their direct transfixing rays. 
Sometimes in the American pulpit, though these cases 
are not numerous, there is an exhibition of buffoonery, but 
more often the minister overstrains himself in attempting 
to be direct, as he utters himself in apothegms, only useful 
to a rudimentary intelligence, because painfully obvious. 
In order to avoid the ritualistic unction, some churches 
emphazise the evangelistic unction, and become too free 
and fraternal, pushing themselves unasked into the in- 
timacies of life, unaware of the unspoken sympathies 
that affect souls, and of the fact that deity has never 
buttonholed humanity in its approaches. 

Men, of course, have to be reached in their own way, 
and ritual in its older forms seems foreign to American 
life; yet American life has ritual of a certain kind. Too 
frequently it has been transposed into the region of nega- 
tion and privation, instead of the enlarging field of symbol 
and art, so that American religion is ritualistic when 
following traditions of simphcity in a sophisticated day. 
The circumstances warranting simphcity are vanishing. 
Where there is an attempt to return to more historic modes 
of worship, in the older communities, still there is difli- 
culty, ever recurring, as the indraught of people from the 
newer communities keeps the demand for simplicity 
vocal. Ritual might be made a school of manners, were 
it not for the persistent tradition of simplicity; and 
manners are needed in worship as elsewhere. Worship 
has been known to end in disorder marked enough to 
cause a bishop to return again to the chancel and cry, — 
"Silence, this is the house of God!" Poor attempts at 
humor, altogether out of place, have been made at the 
installation of ministers. Discomposing attitudes in the 



Moral and Religious Temper 249 

pulpit, and equally irreverent ones in the pew, are too 
frequent. 

Fortunately, there is a gro\sang feeling in the older 
parts of the nation, that order in worship, beauty, and 
spiritual elevation are indispensable in the approaching 
day; and the finer church fabrics are being matched by a 
finer note in worship. Men who are called to preach in 
these communities are being looked at in respect to 
manners. Here and there men of real strength and cultiva- 
tion are gaining places of influence. The mantle of the 
gracious Phillips Brooks has fallen on a few. Ritual and 
orderliness are growang in American religion, for the 
reason that they are growing in the national life in the 
higher social ranges. 

Ritual, of course, expresses devotion, or ought to do 
so, and devotion, at bottom, means a prostration of soul 
before God, and the higher worth of life, and an attempt 
to live it. This is not a common attribute of soul in 
America. Cotton Mather's "trembhng walk with God" 
has become a more confident stride. Spiritual visions 
are rare, delicacy of soul rare, as they are everywhere. 
Here and there one gets a glimpse into lives sensitive to 
the wonder of the divine in life; but on the whole America 
is with St. Christopher and not a Kempis. Books of 
spiritual intent do not sell very largely, and words of 
spiritual insight are apt "to go over the heads of the 
people." The tendency, so far as religion visits the in- 
teriors of experience, is to cry out for "the simple life" 
and a thinning out of the needless instruments of living, 
in order to allow some repose of soul. But those wonders 
of introspection, and devotion, that made former ages 
so dramatic in religion seem impossible today. 

For religion in America is objective and concrete. It 
seeks to do something, not to surrender, not to sacrifice. 



250 The Temper of the American People 

but more often to lead off in a new enterprise, anywhere, 
so long as it be forward. It does not urgently try to get 
a glimpse of the deeps within, perhaps not even to get a 
look above. This is not to say there are no mystics and 
wandbearers in the country of Emerson, but they are few, 
and not so articulate as the more energetic religionists, 
A few now are returning to the inner life again; a few of 
the seminaries are offering courses on the mystical writers, 
and occasionally there is a revived interest in the classics 
of the soul, and ministerial retreats are growing in favor. 
So there are signs that religion in America is awaking to 
the unexplored residues of life, and the arid epoch when 
the world was too much with it is passing away, and there 
is hope for finer things. 

K later American religion has not felt secure in the 
presence of the mysteries of the ideal, it has managed the 
practicalities of the ideals it attempted to carry out excel- 
lently well. It has shown its vitality and earnestness in 
"works." 

It has persistently kept religion before the people, and 
it has earnestly planted new churches in a miraculously 
enlarging country. If the industrial observer is amazed 
at the subjugation of a continental nature, the social 
observer must note as equally intrepid the conquest of 
the moral continent. A population growing by excess of 
life is to be provided for, in a country that barely supports 
itseK in the first generation. Shelter, schools, roads, pro- 
tection, have to be created out of the primal elements of 
human sweat and blood. Backed by the older settled 
communities the church enters, for the invitation of the 
undetermined is felt on every side. The opportunity is 
set forth in crowded assemblies, and money is freely 
given. 

Never before has the world witnessed so munificent a 



Moral and Religious Temper 251 

benevolence, perhaps because never before was there so 
large an immediate need. And all this has been done 
with no historic buildings behind the congregations of 
the older communities, who give so handsomely to ease 
the weight of erection in the sparse new fields. Where 
churches were early formed, several structures marked 
the growth of the organization as it met the needs of each 
generation, so that a building a hundred and fifty years 
old is a rarity, yet these congregations bear a friendly 
part in the erection of buildings in far-away places. The 
practical energy of the religious people is astonishing, and 
it is worthy of ideal and sympathetic interpretation. 

But this is not all. America has been at the front in 
missions abroad. Her energies in this direction are what 
are called by economists the virtuous side of the exploiter's 
method. To give is the other side of to get. America 
has indirectly controlled the destinies of Turkey, since 
the "Young Turk" party was affected by ideas that 
filtered into Turkish life through the graduates of Robert 
College. She has done much in Japan, practically deter- 
mining the first tendencies of education there, and in India 
she has been a wise helper. In these countries her mis- 
sionaries have been recognized by the respective govern- 
ments, as disinterested citizens who sought the highest 
welfare of their adopted lands. Orders and titles came to 
some of them for their unselfish work. Thus, in the 
practical idealism that thinks in the larger unities, 
and works up to the conceptions espoused, America 
has been eminently religious, and successful, in her 
enterprises. 

This immense activity has been at the expense of some 
other phases of the religious life of America. Human 
nature in general can only do one thing at a time, and 
religious human nature, by its preoccupations is likely to 






252 The Temper of the American People 

follow the same rule. While it has been thinking of the 
practical amelioration of men within its own borders, or 
beyond the sea, it has not been quite careful to discover 
what it had to say to men when the fervor of its reor- 
ganization had passed. It has built churches where the 
gospel may be preached; but it is not altogether reason- 
able in the faith it presents. It misses the steadying 
power of the large traditions of history, that, at least, 
open the eyes to the growth of things. Its own tradi- 
tions are recent, parochial, and often the more dogmatic 
because they are estimated over against the merely 
moderate and native. 

American religion has been rudely civilizing in the sense 
that it has laid the formal foundations of society. It is 
not yet as freely cultural as it should be, in the sense of 
making life worth while in the formal organization it has 
delivered to men. It is uncritical for the most part, and 
it is not humanistic enough. 

An astonishing thing is this conservatism of America 
within, and the radicalism without, and nowhere more 
than in the field of religion. Naturally one would expect 
a practical facility in finding direct ways to the execution 
of plans, as one finds it in the secular region: but the 
directness too often stops short of inward thoroughness. 
The American does not dare to be as finely logical as the 
Frenchman, or as bluntly independent as the English- 
man. On the whole, in the churches of America, the mass 
of the members are hardly courageous enough when it 
comes to real thinking. While they willingly risk much 
in mundane things, seeking a home afar, leaving all 
behind them, in religion they are slow to move to the next 
standing place. 

If, in the last resort, American religion fails, after its 
fierce labors of organization, it will be because it has been 



R D - 1 07 



Moral and Religious Temper 253 

so busy establishing its needed instrumentalities, that it 
has forgotten how to think, — or because it has become 
unaware of much that should be taken into account when 
thinking is attempted, — or because it has reached a cer- 
tain lassitude through labor of a practical kind too long 
continued. 




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